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THE GOSLINGS

BOOKS BY UPTON SINCLAIR

(Now in Print and Obtainable)

• THE GOSLINGS: 1924
• HELL: 1923
• THE GOOSE-STEP: 1923
• THEY CALL ME CARPENTER: 1922
• THE BOOK OF LIFE: 1922
• 100%: 1920
• THE BRASS CHECK: 1920
• JIMMIE HIGGINS: 1919
• THE PROFITS OF RELIGION: 1919
• KING COAL: 1917
• THE CRY FOR JUSTICE: 1915
• DAMAGED GOODS: 1913
• SYLVIA’S MARRIAGE: 1913
• THE FASTING CURE: 1911
• SAMUEL THE SEEKER: 1909
• THE METROPOLIS: 1907
• THE JUNGLE: 1906
• MANASSAS: 1904
• THE JOURNAL OF ARTHUR STIRLING: 1903
• PRINCE HAGEN: 1902

The Goslings
A Study of the American Schools

BY

UPTON SINCLAIR

Author of

“The Goose-step,” “The Brass Check,” “The Profits of Religion,” etc.

UPTON SINCLAIR

Pasadena, California

Copyright, 1924

BY

UPTON SINCLAIR

All rights reserved.

First edition, January, 1924, 5,000 copies, clothbound, 5,000 copies, paperbound.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY

Life has given you one of its precious treasures, a child; a body to nurture, a character to train, a mind with endless possibilities of growth, a soul with hidden stores of tenderness and beauty—all these are Nature’s gifts. Modern science has shown that within the child’s soul lies magically locked up all the past of our race; also, it is evident that within it lies all the future of our race. What our children are now being made is what America will be.

You send these little ones to school. Twenty-three millions of them troop off every week-day morning, with their shining faces newly washed, their clothing cleaned and mended. You bear them, you rear them, with infinite pains and devotion you prepare them, and feed them into the gigantic educational machine.

You do not know much about this machine. You have turned it over to others to run. Every year you pay to maintain it a billion dollars of wealth which you have produced by real and earnest toil. You take it for granted that this billion dollars is competently used; that those who run the machine are giving your twenty-three million children the best education that forty-three dollars and forty-seven cents per child will buy.

The purpose of this book is to show you how the “invisible government” of Big Business which controls the rest of America has taken over the charge of your children. In the course of a public debate with the writer, in the Civic Club in New York City, May, 1922, Dr. Tildsley, district superintendent of the public school system of that city, made the statement: “I do not know any school system in the United States which is run for the benefit of the children. They are all run for the benefit of the gang.” This statement, made upon high authority, is the thesis of “The Goslings.” Come with me and let me show you what is this “gang” which runs the school system of the United States; how they got their power, what use they make of it, and what this means to the bodies and minds of your twenty-three million little ones.

To assist the reader in finding his way through a big book, I give traveling directions:

Pages 1 to 22 take you behind the scenes of that “invisible government” which is now ruling America, including its schools. Pages 22 to 59 show in detail what this “invisible government” is doing to the schools of one large American city—Los Angeles. Pages 59 to 93 study the schools of New York, and 94 to 109 those of Chicago. Pages 109 to 224 deal with school conditions in a score of other large cities. I realize that this is a large number; but then, many people are interested in these cities. You will find both melodrama and humor in the stories; and if there is too much, you can skip!

Beginning at page 224 is a study of the state and national machines of the school world; and whatever else you miss, do not miss the National Education Association, and how it was stolen from the teachers of America—there is no drama on Broadway to equal that for thrills. From 275 to 329 you will find a score of powerful Big Business organizations which have assumed to take control of our schools. From 330 to 349 comes the Catholic Church in relation to the schools—this in addition to details given in a number of cities. From 349 to 417 you will find a general survey of the school situation from the point of view of both pupils and teachers. The concluding chapters discuss “The Goose-step” and its critics, and developments in the college world since its publication.

THE GOSLINGS

A Study of the American Schools

CHAPTER I
LAND OF ORANGE-GROVES AND JAILS

I begin this study of the American school system with Southern California, because that is the part of the country in which I live, and which therefore I know best. It is a representative part, being the newest and most recently mixed. We have all the races, white and black and yellow and red; but the great bulk of the population is of native stock, farmers from the Middle West who have sold or rented their homesteads and moved to this “roof-garden of the world.” It is our fashion to hold reunions and picnics for the old home folks, and there are few states that cannot gather thousands of representatives.

We have the most wonderful climate in the world, and soil which is fertile under irrigation. Our leading occupation is selling this soil and climate to new arrivals from the East. We are eager traders, and everything we have is for sale; you can buy the average house in Southern California for two hundred dollars more than the owner paid for it, and I know people who have sold their homes and moved several times in one year. Also, we have struck oil, and this sudden wealth has fanned our collective greed. We boast ourselves “the white spot on the industrial map.” Hard times do not touch us, we build literally whole streets of new houses every week, and labor agitators are banished from our midst.

The intellectual tone of the community is set by a great newspaper, the Los Angeles “Times,” created by an unscrupulous accumulator of money. The “Times” has now grown enormously wealthy, but it still carries on in its founder’s spirit of hatred and calumny. It boasts of being the largest newspaper in the world—meaning that it prints the most advertisements. You pay ten cents for the Sunday edition, and have two or three pages of Associated Press dispatches with the life censored out of them; after that, you grope your way through a wilderness of commercialism. I stop and wonder, how can I give the reader an idea of the intellectual garbage upon which our Southern California population is fed. I pick up this morning’s paper, and find a cartoon on the front page, our daily hymn of hate against Soviet Russia; the cartoon is labeled in large letters: “Out of the Fryingpansky into the Fireovitch.” As the naturalist Agassiz could construct a whole animal from a piece of fossil bone, so you may comprehend a culture from that piece of wit.

We have several hundred churches of all sects, and our “Times” prints pages of church news and sermons, and double-leaded two-column editorials invoking the aid of Jehovah in all emergencies. But the real spirit of the staff breaks out on the other pages; when it is necessary to represent Los Angeles in a cartoon, their symbol is a sly young prostitute with sparkling black eyes and naked limbs. Once upon a time such pictures were purchased surreptitiously and handed round by naughty little boys; but now they are delivered every morning by carrier to everybody’s home. One of the features of our life is “bathing beauties”; young ladies in thin tights parading the boardwalks of the beaches, winning prizes from chambers of commerce and lending gayety to Sunday supplements. Any new stunt is worth a fortune to one of these ladies; one day a lady has gilded her legs, and the next day a lady has butterflies painted on her back, and next—most elegant of all—a lady appears with a bathing-suit and a monocle.

The men, thus summoned, come in droves. Competition is keen, and the ladies are strenuous in defense of their meal-tickets, and when one trespasses upon another’s rights, we have a thrilling murder story. Our lady murderesses are a leading feature of Southern California life; sometimes they shoot, and sometimes they poison, and sometimes they go to the nearest five- and ten-cent store and buy a hammer, and beat out the other lady’s brains. Then they are sent to jail, which is a career of glory, with photographs and interviews in every edition of the newspapers, and a sensational trial with full details of their many lovers and their quarrels. Autobiographies written in prison are featured in Sunday supplements and advertised on billboards; and finally comes the climax—a magical jail delivery. We know, of course, that nowhere in America can the jails hold the rich, but out here in Southern California the rich don’t even wait to be pardoned by presidents and governors—they tip their jailers twenty-five hundred dollars and walk right out. “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage!”

Fifteen years ago the writer had haunting his mind what he thought was to be a great blank verse tragedy. The scene of one act was to be laid several hundred years in the future, and the crowning achievement of that time was an invention whereby music could be made audible to people all over the world. The scene was to show a great musician, whose inspiration was being thus conveyed to humanity. And now we have this invention—somewhat ahead of time! Our radio in Southern California is presided over by the “Times,” and the invisible government decides what is safe for our hungry masses to hear.

Our plutocracy has just built for itself a new hotel, a sultan’s dream of luxury, costing several million dollars. The opening of this hotel became the great historical event of Southern California; there were several pages about it in the newspapers, and it was announced that a certain prominent person, would convey his inspiration to the multitude over the “Times” radio. In a hundred thousand homes the hungry “fans” put on their ear-caps and awaited the sublime moment; and meanwhile in the Hotel Biltmore a great part of the guests got royally drunk. The orator had his share, and his inspiration over the radio took the form of obscenities and cursing; the horrified “fans” heard his friends trying to stop him, begging him to come and have one more drink; but he told them they were a set of blankety blank blank fools, and that he knew what he was going to say, and it was nobody’s blankety blank blank business. This continued until suddenly the radio was shut off, and the fans were left to silence and speculation!

Also, we have Hollywood; Hollywood, the world’s greatest honey-pot, with its thousands of beautiful golden bees swarming noisily; Hollywood, where youth and gayety grow rotten before they grow ripe. If you say that Hollywood is not America, I answer that you have only to wait. Hollywood is young America.

Of course our hundreds of churches are not entirely inactive. We have revivalists, who furiously denounce the sins of Hollywood, using the most up-to-date slang; and groups of men and women, instead of going to the movies, gather in Bible classes and learn the history of the Hittites and the succession of the kings of the Jebusites. You can hear sermons over the radio—that is, if you have a high-priced set, and can tune out the jazz orchestras. The cheaper sets hear everything at once, and you can dance to the sermons or pray to the jazz, as you prefer.

Who runs this new empire of the Southwest? It is run by a secret society, which I have named the Black Hand; consisting of a dozen or so of big bankers and business men, hard-fisted, cunning and unscrupulous profiteers of the pioneer type, a scant generation removed from the bad man with a gun on each hip. They are the inner council and directing circle of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association; with a propaganda department formerly known as the Commercial Federation of California, and now camouflaged as the Better America Federation. Concerning this latter organization, you will find much information in “The Goose Step,” pages 129-132. It occupies the entire floor of a large building, and has raised a fund of a hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year for five years for its campaign of terrorism. Like all criminals, it operates under many aliases: the American Protective League, the Association for Betterment of the Public Service, the Associated Patriotic Societies, the Taxpayers’ Association, the People’s Economy League, the Tax Investigating and Economy League, the Americanization Committee, the Committee of One Thousand, the Committee of Ten Thousand, the Parent-Teachers’ Associations, the Board of Education, the District Attorney’s Office, and the Police Department of the City of Los Angeles.

Ours is an “open shop” city; that is, the business men and merchants are forbidden to employ union workers, and if they disregard this rule they are blacklisted, their credit is cut off, and they are driven into bankruptcy. When a new man comes into town and sets up in business he is politely interviewed and invited to join the gang; at the same time he is given his orders, and if he disobeys, he moves on to some other part of the world, or down into the ranks of the wage-slaves. So perfect is the system of the Black Hand, so all-seeing is its spy service, that the Young Women’s Christian Association could not prepare and mail out a circular letter asking for funds without every merchant in the city having on his desk by the same mail a letter from the Better America Federation president, warning him that the Young Women’s Christian Association is supporting the eight-hour day for women, the minimum wage law for women, and other immoral propositions.

We have a “criminal syndicalism law” in California; the public is told by the Black Hand and its newspapers that this law is to punish men who advocate the overthrow of government by force and violence. Under this law eighty men are now coughing out their lungs in the jute mill at San Quentin prison, under sentence of from two to twenty-eight years. As I write, one of these men collapses under the strain and refuses to work longer in the jute mill, and seventy others are being tortured in “solitary” because they “strike” in sympathy with this comrade. No one of these men has ever had proven against him, or even charged against him, any act of force or violence or any destruction of property. They were convicted because the Black Hand of California pays three hundred and fifty dollars a month to several hired witnesses, who travel about from place to place testifying before juries that ten years ago, when they belonged to the I. W. W., they, the witnesses, personally burned down barns. Because of this testimony men who have recently joined the organization, and have never burned down barns nor advocated burning down barns, are sentenced to the jute mill.

The public does not know, and has no means of guessing that the law on the statute books against “criminal syndicalism” has been modified by the police who enforce it to read “suspicion of criminal syndicalism.” That means that any man may be arrested at any time that any police official does not happen to like the way he has his hair cut, or the red flower in his button-hole. Crime and suspicion of crime are the same thing in our legal procedure, because men once thrown into jail are held there “incommunicado” without warrant or charge; they are not permitted to see attorneys, and their friends cannot find out what has become of them. They are starved and beaten and tortured in jail; so there is no longer any difference between innocence and guilt. The eighty convicted in the state’s prison suffer less than the many hundreds of unconvicted in jails and police stations all over the state.

What this means is that the Black Hand is trying to smash industrial unionism. They have got the old-line unions cowed; they have purchased or frightened most of the leaders, and driven them out of politics, and are no longer afraid of them. But now comes the new movement, the mass union, the portent of the New Day. They are fighting this as furiously as the Spanish Inquisition ever fought against heresy; but to their bewilderment and dismay they are repeating the age-old experience of the torturer and the despot—the blood of the martyrs is becoming the seed of the church!

There came a great strike at the harbor. “San Pedro” is a part of our city, where the ships come in laden with lumber and pipe and cement for the endless new streets of homes. Our army of real estate speculators and contractors and bankers are reaping their golden harvest, while several thousand longshoremen slave, literally fourteen and sixteen hours a day of back-breaking toil, handling these heavy materials. They clamor at the docks, bidding against one another, fighting and trampling one another for a chance of life. And here is a ring of grafting employment agencies, secretly maintained by the Shipyard Owners’ Association, draining the last drops of energy from these wretched wage-slaves. The old-line respectable unions are out of business, and everything is serene for the masters; but suddenly comes a flare-up—three thousand men on strike, and one or two hundred I. W. W. organizers spreading the flames of revolt—and just when we thought we had sent the last of them to San Quentin for twenty-eight years!

The strike tied up the harbor and tied it tight. For more than two weeks not a ship was unloaded, and all the building operations of all the speculators came to an end. One day the “Times” would deny that there was any strike, and next day it would declare that the strike had been broken the day before, the next day it would declare that the strike would be broken the day after next. And in the inner circle of the torturers and despots, such confusion and such fury as you will hardly be able to imagine.

You have taken up this book, expecting to read about the American school system; and now you are being told about a strike! It happened that this strike came just as I was settling down to write “The Goslings.” I got arrested; and this experience plows a furrow through one’s mind. Now I sit at home and think about the schools, and naturally, I see them in relation to this series of events—they become one more device of the strikebreakers.

I ponder the problem, how to start this book. I want to show you the invisible government which runs your schools, for its own profit, and your loss. This power is the same power which runs your politics and industry; here in Los Angeles, the very men who smashed the union of the shipyard workers also smashed the councils of the school teachers. Indeed, as chance willed it, the two jobs came together and became one job; so that every lie told against the strikers was a lie against the teachers, and every dollar wrested from the shipyard workers was balanced by a dollar stolen from the schools.

I ask myself, therefore: How can I do better, at the beginning of this book, than to tell you what I saw at the harbor? This strike was a blazing searchlight, thrown into the very vitals of our invisible government; if you will follow it, you will see the whole system, and understand every detail of its mechanism. So I ask you to set aside for the moment all questions of labor unions, criminal syndicalism, anything of that sort; come with me as a plain American, believing in the Constitution, believing in the people, and their right to run their own affairs. Follow the story of this labor struggle—and before you get to the end of it you will magically find yourself reading about the schools, and learning who has taken them away from you, and why they have done it, and what it means to you and your children.

CHAPTER II
THE ADVENTURE OF THE UNIVERSITY CLUB

The first step in this narrative is to explain how it happened that the writer of this book, a muck-raker and enemy of society, was in the office of Mr. Irwin Hays Rice, president of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association of Los Angeles, and chief of the Black Hand, at the very moment when Mr. Rice was conspiring with his fellow chiefs for the smashing of the harbor strike. This story is amusing in itself, and not altogether alien to education.

In April, 1923, I received a letter from the secretary of the University Club of Pasadena, my home city, asking if I would consent to lecture before the club on the subject of “The Goose-step.” I replied that I was busy, and made it a rule to decline invitations to lecture. Then came a telephone call from a member of the club, begging me to reconsider my decision; here were a group of men, influential in the community, some of whom had read “The Goose-step” and thought they could answer me, and wanted a chance to try. It would be an adventure for them, and might teach me something. To oblige a friend, I accepted, and the lecture was announced at a dinner of the club, and the announcement was published in the local newspapers—upon the club’s initiative, please note.

At once the Black Hand got busy; and a week or two later a gentleman called at my home, obviously embarrassed and pink in the face, explaining that he was the president of the University Club of Pasadena. The executive committee had held a meeting the previous evening and decided that in view of certain objections, I should be respectfully requested to consent to have the lecture called off. Knowing my community, I was sympathetic towards the blushing respectable gentleman—an ex-naval officer who would have faced the guns of a foreign foe, but dared not face a new idea. I answered that I would be content to have the lecture forgotten.

But an hour or two later a newspaper reporter called me up, asking if I had heard that the action of the University Club had been taken at the instance of William J. Burns, head of the Burns Detective Agency and chief of the United States Secret Service. Naturally, I was interested in that news; as a matter of tactics, when I find a man like Burns after me, I go to meet him head on. I at once telegraphed, asking Mr. Burns if it was true that he had called me “a dangerous enemy of the United States government.” The result was a tangle of falsehoods, and if I proceed to untangle them, do not think that I am rambling. Before we get through with this book we shall discover that the big private detective agencies are an important part of the educational system of the United States, and so what we learn about Mr. Burns and his methods will be to the point.

The great detective telegraphed me from San Francisco that my name had not been the subject of discussion at any time during his visit to Los Angeles. I was not satisfied with that, and telegraphed again, saying that I wanted to know if he had mentioned me at any time in Southern California, and if he had done so, would he say openly and for publication what he had said against me. In the meantime there had been published a United Press dispatch from San Francisco, quoting Mr. Burns as saying that if he had mentioned me, it had been “as a private individual and not as a government official.” Therefore I pointed out to Mr. Burns that he could not say anything about me as a private citizen; whatever he said would be assumed by everyone to be based upon information he had got as head of the United States Secret Service. This brought a second telegram from Mr. Burns, as follows:

Replying to your second wire, I made no statements concerning you as a private citizen or government official at Pasadena or elsewhere, nor have I ever undermined the character of you or any other person. I want to also deny that I ever made any statement to the United Press as stated in your telegram, and for your further information let me assure you whenever I express myself concerning you or anyone else I will not hesitate to admit it.

That seemed explicit, and I was prepared to accept it. But you note that it left the United Press in a bad light; and representatives of the United Press took the matter up, and wired their head office in San Francisco, receiving the information that the interview with Mr. Burns had been given to Frank Clarvoe, one of their most trusted and experienced men. Mr. Clarvoe had been with Mr. Burns in his hotel room when the telegram from me arrived, and Mr. Burns had allowed Mr. Clarvoe to make a copy of this telegram, and had dictated a reply, slowly and distinctly, so that Mr. Clarvoe could write it down. The manager of the United Press added that this was evidently one of those frequent cases where parties talk and afterwards wish to deny it.

In the meantime I had been interviewing the executive committee of the University Club of Pasadena, holding over the heads of these gentlemen the threat of a slander suit, and thereby inducing each of them in turn to state upon exactly what basis he had repeated the statements about Mr. Burns and myself. So the report was definitely traced to Mr. Irwin Hays Rice, president of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association of Los Angeles, and one of the chiefs of the Black Hand. Mr. Rice, in a conversation over the telephone, had stated to the secretary of the club that Mr. Burns had described me as “a parlor pink and a dangerous enemy of the United States government.”

So now I had a clean-cut issue of veracity between Mr. Rice and Mr. Burns, and it seemed worth a trip to Los Angeles to find out which was the liar. I went in on a Monday morning, and fate was unkind to Mr. Rice—he had been out of town over the week-end, and had not read anything about the controversy, nor had anyone in the University Club taken the trouble to call him up and warn him. I took the precaution to bring my brother-in-law, Hunter Kimbrough, as witness to the interview, and Mr. Rice received us in his private office. I explained my point of view: he and I were antagonists on opposite sides of the class struggle; I had my opinion of him, and freely granted him the right to have his opinion of me. The only thing I took exception to was the fact that in discussing me he had made use of the name of Mr. Burns.

Mr. Rice is one of these two-fisted men of action, quite different from the president of a University Club. His answer was prompt and explicit: “Anything that I say once I’ll say twice. It is a fact that at a recent gathering, in the presence of myself and several business men of this city, Mr. William J. Burns stated that you were ‘a parlor pink and a dangerous enemy of the United States government.’”

“I thank you, Mr. Rice,” I replied. “Now I am wondering what you will have to say to this telegram”; and I put into his hands the telegram from Mr. Burns, declaring: “I made no statements concerning you as a private citizen or government official at Pasadena or elsewhere, nor have I ever undermined the character of you or any other person.” “What have you to say to that, Mr. Rice?” I asked, and Mr. Rice replied: “Well, I will say that I am surprised.” It was unnecessary for him to say that—his face showed it!

Mr. Rice refused to name the other men who had been present at the interview, but he remarked that the gathering was of such a nature that it was manifest to everyone that Mr. Burns was there as a private citizen, and not as chief of the United States Secret Service. Do you think I would be reckless if I should guess that it was a gathering of the chiefs of the Black Hand, and that Mr. Burns was there in his other capacity, as head of the William J. Burns agency of espionage and strike-breaking?

That the William J. Burns agency is thus employed regularly by the Black Hand of Southern California is something which I have known for several years. Turn to Chapter LXVI of “The Brass Check,” and you will find there the story of how Sydney Flowers, returned soldier and editor of the “Dugout,” was smashed by the Black Hand in Los Angeles, because he refused to permit his paper to be used as a strike-breaking agency. I did what I could to aid Flowers and save him from the penitentiary, and as a result the Black Hand attempted a “frame-up” against myself. Wishing to know just who was responsible for this, I thought I would employ the most famous and most reputable detective agency in the United States. With my attorney, Mr. John Beardsley, I called at the office of this agency and interviewed the manager. As chance willed it, the district manager, the high-up person who travels about the country overseeing the affairs of the agency for Mr. Burns, was also present at the interview.

I explained the case, confidentially of course, stating that I had suspicions that the trail might lead to the office of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association and its Los Angeles “Times,” and that I wished the agency not to take the case unless they would be in position to follow a trail to such a quarter. The two managers requested a little time to think the matter over, and that afternoon they gave us their decision: the William J. Burns Detective Agency, because of the embarrassing possibility explained by me, could not undertake to investigate this “frame-up.” Then I went to another detective agency in the city, and when I told the manager about this incident he laughed heartily and told me that the Burns Agency did all the secret work for the “M. and M.” Incidentally, this man told me that he himself could not take the case, because his business would be ruined if he did; nor would I find any other detective agency in the city which would take the case. And in this he was correct.

To complete the story of the Burns Detective Agency, I will also mention that just prior to America’s entry into the World War this agency was conducting a spy service in the United States for the German government. Shortly before the sinking of the Lusitania, the Burns’ agency had men stationed in American munition plants and was secretly selling information to German government agents, who were gathering knowledge of munition shipments for the purpose of torpedoing munition-laden vessels. The head of Burns’ New York office, Gaston B. Means, admitted under oath that he delivered reports in a secret place to an unknown man to whom he was directed by the German government spy, Paul Koenig. The Burns agency perpetrated against the United States government a gigantic frame-up designed to supply von Bernstorff with perjured evidence for diplomatic use against the United States government. Tug boat captains were hired by a nest of German military spies under the direction of Burns’ New York agent, Gaston B. Means, the captains being induced to swear to false affidavits to indicate that they were carrying supplies to British vessels outside New York harbor in violation of the laws of neutrality. In this frame-up the Burns agency was caught red-handed, but was given immunity from prosecution because its clients could better be caught by holding this club over Burns’ head. Recently, when the Workers’ Party called a mass meeting in our national capital, at which Robert Minor was announced to tell this story, the use of the hall was mysteriously withdrawn, and Mr. William J. Burns, in his capacity as chief of the United States Secret Service, raided the offices of the sponsors of the meeting and arrested a dozen men.

CHAPTER III
IN WHICH I GET ARRESTED

The purpose of the previous chapter was to explain to you the series of events whereby it came about that Upton Sinclair, muckraker and enemy of society, was in the office of the president of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association of Los Angeles, at ten o’clock on the morning of Monday, May 7th, 1923.

My brother-in-law, Hunter Kimbrough, and myself had come without appointment; at the same time two gentlemen came in who had an appointment—so a polite clerk explained. I had not presented my card, and no one there knew either Kimbrough or myself; we were invited to sit down, and did so, while the other gentlemen were escorted into the inner office. We made no effort to listen to what went on, but we had to hear it, because the door of the inner office was left ajar, and the talk was carried on in tones which caused the clerks in the outer office to drop their work and look at one another and grin.

“Who is that?” asked the young lady stenographer.

“That’s Mr. Hammond,” was the answer of the chief clerk. “He owns a couple of hundred thousand acres of timber land, and he’s got about twenty ships tied up at the harbor.”

“Oh,” said the young lady stenographer, “then he’s got a right to pound on the table.”

He exercised his right, and pounded, and cursed so freely that the young lady was moved to get up and close the office door; but still we heard the uproar. The substance of it was that the San Pedro strike, which had been on for about two weeks, must be smashed without another day’s delay. Mr. Rice argued and expostulated; they were doing their best. Finally he promised there would be “a meeting” that afternoon, and arrangements would be made. That you may understand clearly, I explain that Mr. Andrew B. Hammond, president of the Hammond Lumber Company, is one of the big “open shop” despots of San Francisco, a bigger man even than Mr. Rice; and he had come down on the night train to lay down the law to the timid crowd at Los Angeles and insist that his ships be moved. Wishing to make sure there was no mistake in identity, I engaged the head clerk in conversation, asking him how long he thought “those irate ship-owners” would stay in there. He rose to the bait and discussed the “irate ship-owners,” assuring me that they would not need to stay much longer; the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association was not going to have any trouble in opening up the harbor. Subsequently, as part of the preparing of this manuscript, I wrote to Mr. Hammond, asking if he cared to deny that he was in Mr. Rice’s office at the hour specified. He did not reply.

Come now to San Pedro, where three thousand men are fighting to get their babies a chance to grow up into full-sized human beings. They have won their strike, they have won it strictly under the law; they have kept order rigidly—having even smashed the boot-leggers, to the great dismay of the police! Here again I do not have to ask you to take my word for it: Police Captain Plummer, in command at the harbor, stated to my brother-in-law, Hunter Kimbrough, in the presence of several witnesses, that he had no fault to find with the I. W. W., they were fine fellows, and had kept order through the strike. Also he stated in the presence of witnesses: “I smashed that strike.” Before an investigating committee of the clergymen of Los Angeles he stated: “Yes, I said that, and I’ll say it again.” Officer Wyckoff—who arrested us—stated to Hunter Kimbrough, in the presence of two ladies, whose signed statements I have, that “Black Jack” Jerome, the strike-breaker, had brought in hundreds of gunmen, heavily armed; Captain Plummer had disarmed them, but someone saw to it that they received another supply of arms.

Mr. Hammond and his Shipyard Owners’ Association and his horde of gunmen having failed to provoke violence, or to move the ships, Mr. Rice must act; and how is he to act? For ten or twenty years he and his Black Hand have been preparing for precisely such an emergency; they have been buying both political machines, and controlling the nominations of all candidates, so that now they have their own governor, their own legislators, their own mayor, their own city council, their own chief of police, and their own judges. They control the governmental machine from top to bottom; and they give the orders, let this strike be smashed.

The man who put through the job is Asa Keyes, then deputy district attorney, since promoted to be district attorney as reward for his efficiency. “The mayor is not handling this situation,” said Chief of Police Oaks to me. “The man we’re getting our orders from is Asa Keyes, and if you want to speak at the harbor, see him.” Keyes is the man who has been enforcing the “suspicion of criminal syndicalism” law; he pays an army of secret agents and provocateurs, and a year or two ago he stated to two different informants of mine: “I have spent between four and five thousand dollars, trying to ‘get’ Kate Crane Gartz and Upton Sinclair. If ever I become chief, I will spend ten times that amount to ‘get’ them.”

Mr. Rice, Mr. Keyes, Chief Oaks, and Captain Plummer attended the “meeting” which Mr. Rice promised to Mr. Hammond. “I have attended several conferences of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association,” said the naive Captain Plummer to Hunter Kimbrough, in the presence of witnesses. “Mr. Rice was present and Mr. Marco Hellman, and others.” Marco Hellman, the biggest banker of Los Angeles, we shall hear of again before long.

In the early days of the strike a Presbyterian clergyman and Harvard graduate was arrested while addressing the strikers, the charge being “blocking traffic.” Police Magistrate Sheldon, in sentencing him to jail, said: “Why don’t you hire a hall, or speak upon private property? Then you will not be molested.” The strikers thought this was good advice; they found a piece of vacant land, whose lessor was willing for it to be used for mass meetings, and on this land, known as “Liberty Hill,” the strikers held numerous meetings. At one of these meetings a group of them raised the flags of fifteen nations, with the American flag at the top, and the flag of Russia included. There were Russians among the strikers, and presumably they thought their country had a right to be represented.

This incident took place five days after the meeting between Messrs. Rice and Hammond, and it afforded the pretext for which the police were waiting. “You’ve lost your constitutional rights now!” shouted Captain Plummer, and he arrested twenty-eight men for the crime of raising the red flag. Again and again, in negotiations with the police officials, and with Mayor George E. Cryer, we were told that this act of raising the red flag afforded complete justification for the abrogation of all civil liberties at the harbor. It seems therefore worth noting[noting] what happened some three weeks later, when these men were arraigned in court upon the charge. Police Magistrate Crawford declared that in his opinion everyone who displayed a red flag should be sent to prison, but unfortunately the Supreme Court of California had declared the red flag ordinance of the city of Los Angeles unconstitutional!

In the three days that followed, the police arrested a total of six hundred men; they arrested hundreds for attempting to speak on Liberty Hill; they arrested hundreds for singing and cheering on the street. Any slightest sign of sympathy with the strike or with other arrested men was enough to cause a man to be tapped on the shoulder by the police and told to report at the police station. Crowds of men were surrounded on the street, loaded into trucks, carted off to the police station, and packed away in cells. George Chalmers Richmond, Episcopal clergyman from Philadelphia, was arrested when walking along the street, having in mind the criminal intention of addressing the strikers when he reached the place of meeting. A restaurant proprietor was dragged out from behind his counter and thrown into jail, upon the charge of helping to prolong the strike—that is, he had fed the strikers and their children. In describing these incidents, the Los Angeles “Times” stated that the police announced their intention “to arrest all idle men at the harbor.”

The city of Los Angeles boasts of being the fastest growing city in the world, but its jails have not grown at all in the last thirty years. To describe them as death-traps would not be using reckless language, but merely quoting from reports of one public body after another which has investigated and denounced them. The jails were already crowded; and here were six hundred more men suddenly thrust into them! Some of the “tanks,” built to hold twenty or thirty men, were required to hold a hundred, and it was literally impossible for all the men to sit down at once. All the jails were swarming with vermin, there was no bedding obtainable, and the food was atrocious. These things not being enough, wanton cruelty and torture was added. In one of the “tanks,” because the men persisted in singing, the jailers sealed up all the ventilation and turned on the steam heat for two hours. Ninety-five men were in this hole, and many of them swooned. Other men were chained up by the thighs, so that they could not quite sit down. We have the affidavits of several men to the fact that Chief of Police Oaks personally reviled the prisoners, calling them liars and degenerates; and when one of the men spoke up and said this was not true, Oaks called him out from the “tank,” and in the presence of many witnesses struck him in the face and knocked him down again and again, pounding him until the chief was exhausted.

Such was the situation on May 15th. The “Times” for that morning announced that the city council had appropriated money to build a stockade, in which to hold the strike prisoners, and all the remaining strikers at the harbor were to be thrown into this pen. I was about to begin the writing of this book, but I found it impossible to keep my peace of mind in a “bull-pen” civilization, and decided to do what I could to remind the authorities of Southern California that there is still supposed to be a Constitution in this country.

With seven friends I went to interview the mayor that afternoon. The interview lasted an hour, and developed curious notions upon the part of the chief executive of a large city concerning the meaning of civil rights. According to Mayor Cryer, all the arrests which had been made night after night on Liberty Hill, and the complete abrogation of the rights of freedom of speech and of assemblage, were justified by the fact that somebody unknown had violated the unconstitutional ordinance of the city of Los Angeles against the displaying of a red flag. The wholesale arrests of hundreds of men upon the street day after day were justified by the fact that on one occasion some rowdy unknown had shouted: “Here comes Captain Plummer, that fat prostitute.” I said: “Mr. Mayor, according to your way of reasoning, if some one were to upset a peanut stand on Broadway and steal the peanuts, you would feel justified in arresting everybody in sight and closing the thoroughfare to traffic for a month.”

Our mayor is a politician, and cautious. He would not say that it was the duty of the police to smash the harbor strike, neither would he say that a group of American citizens had the right to proceed to Liberty Hill and there read the Constitution of their country and explain to all who might care to hear them the meaning of the Bill of Rights. His proposition was that we should go to the harbor and ask permission of Captain Plummer, and if Plummer refused, the mayor would “review” his decision. To this we answered that the essence of the situation was time; the strikers were being robbed of their rights every hour, and civil liberties were not subject to review by either a police captain or a mayor. The upshot of the hour’s argument was that Mayor Cryer made the specific promise that he would telephone to Captain Plummer and instruct him that we were to be “protected in our constitutional rights, and not molested so long as we did not incite to violence.” Let it be added that at his next interview the mayor denied that he had made this promise.

Now, I shall not take up space in detailing what happened to our little group. Suffice it to say, we repaired to the harbor, a dozen ladies and gentlemen, with two lawyers; and in an interview with Chief of Police Oaks we were informed that if we attempted to read the Constitution of the United States on Liberty Hill we would be arrested and jailed without bail. Four of us, Prince Hopkins, Hugh Hardyman, Hunter Kimbrough, and the writer, did attempt to read the Constitution. I personally read Article One of the first amendment, and was then placed under arrest. Kimbrough started to read the Declaration of Independence. Hopkins remarked, “We have not come here to incite to violence.” Hardyman remarked, “This is a most delightful climate.” For these words they were arrested—all four of us for “suspicion of criminal syndicalism.”[^[A]] We were held “incommunicado” for eighteen hours, and an effort was then made to rush us into court a few minutes before closing time, and have us committed and spirited away again, so that we could be given the “third degree”; but this plot was balked, owing to the fact that a confidant of Chief Oaks betrayed it to my wife, and our lawyers got to the court and demanded and obtained bail. A week later we went again to the harbor and held our mass meeting, and said to ten or fifteen thousand people everything that we had to say. Next day the police turned loose all but twenty-eight of the six hundred men they had arrested; and some three weeks later a police judge threw out the case against us four. So ended our little adventure in “criminal syndicalism.”

[A]. Extract from a letter written by a student of Washington University, St. Louis, now visiting in Santa Monica, California: “The St. Louis papers had only short accounts, which said that Upton Sinclair and several other I. W. W. had been arrested on a charge of Syndicalism. And my friends out here tell me that a raid was made when Upton Sinclair, after having submitted a most innocuous abstract of his speech to the authorities, exhorted a strikers’ meeting to break loose, smash all windows in sight, and dump the street-cars off the tracks. He also attacked the integrity and honor of the chief of police.”

CHAPTER IV
THE EMPIRE OF THE BLACK HAND

Let us now survey the situation in Southern California as I settle down to the writing of this book. The storm has blown over for the moment. Twenty-eight of the strikers—the best of their leaders—have been shipped off to the jute mill for from two to twenty-eight years. The others are back in the slave-market, bidding against one another for the lives of themselves and their families. Those who were active in the strike are black-listed; even though they own homes at the harbor, they cannot find employment, but must sell out and move on. And meantime, the men who robbed them are enjoying the “swag.” Mr. Andrew B. Hammond has gone back to San Francisco, to the comforts of the Bohemian Club, and the Pacific Union Club, and the Commercial Club, and the San Francisco Golf Club; while Mr. I. H. Rice continues to run the political and business affairs of Los Angeles.

Some lovers of fair play have organized a branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, to teach the people of this community the elementary idea that the Constitution applies to the poor as well as to the rich. True to our program of the open forum, we call upon Mr. Rice and courteously invite him to set forth his ideas of constitutional rights to one of our audiences. Mr. Rice declines the invitation, and so does Mr. Harry Haldeman, president of the Better America Federation, and so does Mr. Marco Hellman, the banker, and So does Captain John D. Fredericks, congressman-elect of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association and the Chamber of Commerce—it is reported that they put up twelve thousand dollars additional salary for him, because so important a man could not afford to go to Congress otherwise!

Among the “tips” which came to me in the course of the struggle was one to the effect that Captain Plummer and Chief Oaks were each presented with a gold watch as a tribute of gratitude from the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association. At a hearing before the Ministerial Union I had opportunity to ask Captain Plummer about this matter; he admitted with evident embarrassment that he had got a gold watch. I asked him if it was engraved in acknowledgment of his services to the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association; his answer was that it was engraved “From the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association for services to the community.” He added, somewhat naively, that he could not imagine how I had got that information. “No one but Mr. Rice and the jeweler were supposed to know about that watch!”

With six hundred men packed into the filthy jails of Los Angeles, some of them with faces bloody from the fists of Chief Oaks, the chief himself went off to the convention of chiefs of police at Buffalo. He went in glory, taking the policemen’s and firemen’s band of sixty pieces; the expenses of this tour being in part paid by the protected under-world, and in part loaned by Marco Hellman, banker and chief of the Black Hand. Mr. Hellman went to the station to see the party off, and on their return he went again to welcome them. Day by day we followed in our newspapers the progress of this tour; they had royal receptions in our biggest cities—and also in Lebanon, Missouri, the village which contributed our great chief of police to the world. The local newspaper mentioned that Mount Vernon was the birthplace of George Washington, and Springfield, Illinois, was the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln!

In the meantime, our Civil Liberties Union was collecting affidavits of men who had been beaten and starved and tortured in jail. We presented these affidavits to the mayor, and the mayor referred us to the city council; we presented them to the city council, and the city council referred us to the police commission; we presented them to the police commission, and the police commission referred them to the committee of the whole. As I said at one of our mass meetings: “It is called the committee of the hole because it hides and nobody can find it.” We were told that the charges would be considered when Chief Oaks came back; the chief came back, and went before the City Club, and in a burst of glory stated that if anyone had charges against any police official he would personally take them before the grand jury. Whereupon we made application to him to present to the grand jury the charge that Chief Oaks had beaten prisoners in jail—and he did not keep his promise. We had brought the charges before the Ministerial Union of the city, and the ministers appointed a committee to investigate; this committee met, and heard many witnesses, but took no action, and has never met again.[^[B]]

[B]. While the rest of this book is being written, Chief Oaks becomes involved in a factional dispute in the Police Department, and his enemies publish affidavits by the police officials of a neighboring town, to the effect that Oaks was arrested a few days ago, while parked in a lonely road with a young woman and a half-gallon jug of whiskey. So Oaks is no longer chief, but plain lieutenant of police, and is telling his friends that he intends to have the inscription cut from his gold watch and to sell it.

The ministers were prejudiced against us, because of something they had read in the “Times”; a statement that the United States Department of Justice had investigated the American Civil Liberties Union and ascertained it to be “the defense branch of the I. W. W.”: this on the authority of “Agent Townsend of the Department of Justice.” We went to call on the head of the Department of Justice in Los Angeles, and learned that there was no “Agent Townsend,” nor had the Department obtained any such information concerning the American Civil Liberties Union. We then called upon the managing editor of the “Times” and presented this information. He promised to look further into the matter; and next morning he published another statement, reiterating the charge, this time giving a formal signed statement by “Agent Townsend of the Department of Justice.” The matter was put before the Department of Justice at Washington, which replied in writing that there was no such person as “Agent Townsend of the Department of Justice.” A copy of this was mailed to the “Times,” with an offer to submit the original. But the “Times” made no reply, and published no retraction. I go into these minute details, because later on I shall assert that the “Times” deliberately lied about the school teachers of Los Angeles; and I wish you to understand that I mean exactly what I say.

The theme of this book is the schools—public schools and private schools, primary and grammar and high schools; and now I have to carry out my promise, to show you that this same Black Hand of Southern California controls our board of education, putting its own representatives thereon; that it controls our school funds, wasting them in graft; that it controls our teachers, browbeating them and underpaying them and denying them their rights as citizens; that it controls our children, drilling them, suppressing them, putting poison thoughts into their minds—so that they shall come out perfect little bigots, prepared to hate and if necessary to tar and feather and lynch those people who try to apply real Americanism to America, and to protect the rights of the poor as well as of the rich. In other words, what the Black Hand wants, and what it has made for itself, is schools which will turn out a generation of children who will stand for all the infamies I have just narrated, and will regard them as right and necessary and patriotic actions, and the men who perpetrate them as courageous public officials and high-minded patriots.

CHAPTER V
THE SCHOOLS OF THE “TIMES”

Naturally, we have to begin with the “Times”; and at the very outset, to show you what the “Times” wants from our schools, I narrate the experience of Mr. M. C. Bettinger, until recently a member of the board of education, and for thirty-eight years connected with the educational system of Los Angeles. In the year 1906 Mr. Bettinger happened to be in the office of Superintendent Foshay, when that gentleman was packing up his belongings and preparing to retire from his job. He took out of his desk a bale of papers two inches thick, fastened with a rubber-band. “Thank God,” he said, “at least I don’t have to pay any more tribute to the ‘Times.’ These are receipts for money which I’ve had to pay to that paper upon one pretext or another for the past eleven years!”

Or consider the experience of Dr. E. C. Moore, who succeeded Mr. Foshay as superintendent. In the year 1907 the National Education Association held its convention in Los Angeles, and in the guide-book prepared for it was an article by General Otis, publisher of the “Times,” denouncing union labor. Dr. Moore had the courage to cut out these passages, and for this General Otis set out to “get” him, and in due course did so.

Dr. Moore’s blunder was that at Christmas time he sent out an order to the principals of schools to be guarded in their proceedings so as not to give offense to any class of people. This was a routine notice, its significance being that Jewish children should not be compelled to take part in religious ceremonials obnoxious to their faith. But Otis saw in it his opportunity; Superintendent Moore was attacking the Christian religion and undermining the basis of all morality! Should such a man remain superintendent of the educational system of a Christian community? The “Times” printed literally pages of attacks upon this basis, interviews with clergymen and parents, and reports of sermons denouncing Dr. Moore, who was thus forced to move on to Yale University.

Next came John H. Francis, and he had a wonderful idea. He was going to have junior high schools all over the city, and the youngsters were to have stenography and typewriting and bookkeeping and manual training—perfect little clerks and shop foremen turned out in two or three years! Francis was a man with a passion for education, a wonderful platform orator; he got his junior high schools, and the fame of them spread all over the United States. But they cost a pile of money, and they didn’t perform the wonders which the business men had hoped for; instead, they got the youngsters interested in music and art and dramatics and debating—and got them organized, so that you couldn’t take these things away from them without a riot! So the Black Hand lost all their enthusiasm for Superintendent Francis, and they tried on him their favorite device of the detective agency and the woman scandal. Recall my statement that the big private detective agencies form an important part of the educational system of the United States!

The president of the board, who was elected to oust Superintendent Francis, was Judge Walter Bordwell, before whom Clarence Darrow was tried. Bordwell was a flabby and repulsive looking man, with the manners of an Irish section-boss; he was a relative of Chandler, and a pet of the “Times.” In 1918, shortly after ousting Francis, Bordwell became the “Times’” candidate for governor; and, as part of his campaign, an assistant superintendent of schools sent a letter to teachers asking them to vote for the Judge. The name of this assistant is Mrs. Susan Dorsey, and I ask you to remember her, because a little later we shall find her rewarded for her fidelity by being made superintendent of schools; we shall find the teachers of Los Angeles presuming to go into politics in the interest of the schools—and Mrs. Dorsey insisting that politics must be rigidly excluded from the system!

Along with Judge Bordwell was elected Mr. Washburn, ex-banker, whose one idea of school administration was to keep down the taxes; Mrs. Waters, the widow of a bank president; and Colonel Andrew Copp, an officer in the state militia. Mr. Bettinger, at that time assistant superintendent, tells me anecdotes which show the attitude of these people toward education. “We don’t want you to come here with opinions,” said Mrs. Waters; “we want you to obey orders.” And in almost the same words Colonel Copp addressed a delegation of teachers who came to him to complain of inability to get supplies. “Don’t come here with your views of things,” stormed the Colonel; “what we want you to do is to do what you’re told.”

In the course of discussion before a board Committee, Mr. Bettinger made so bold as to give his definition of education: “to aid in the unfoldment of a human mind.” Colonel Copp was so furious that he was hardly able to keep still until Mr. Bettinger finished. “Education?” he cried. “I’ll tell you what education is! Education is getting a lot of young people into a room, teaching them a lesson out of a book, hearing them recite it, putting down a mark in figures, and at the end of the year that’s their record. That’s what education is, and we are going to have that and nothing else in Los Angeles.”

Judge Bordwell had gone to New York to put the problem of the Los Angeles schools before the great mogul of plutocratic education, President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia. He came back with Albert Shiels, a product of Butler’s educational enameling machine, who was to make a survey. Shiels was an accountant, not an educator; also, under the charter of the city, he was ineligible for superintendent, not having lived a year in the state. But a little thing like a charter provision would not be allowed to block the will of Judge Bordwell. Dr. Shiels was made superintendent and started publishing anti-Bolshevik propaganda in the teachers’ paper, and circularizing the teachers with such literature. He published in President Butler’s “Educational Review” an article assailing the Soviet government, which article contained no less than one hundred and twenty-four misstatements of fact. Challenged to debate this issue, Dr. Shiels wrote to me: “I believe it is contrary to good public policy to place Bolshevism and its practices on a par with debatable questions.”

But Dr. Shiels soon became disgusted with the crudity of his political masters, and went back to New York to take up a pleasanter job for Nicholas Miraculous. The new president of the school board, a banker and perfect plutocrat by the name of Lynn Helm, selected an assistant superintendent, formerly a teacher of Latin and Greek, as the new boss of the schools. He stated as his reason that he knew she was “safe”; and time has proven that he was a good judge of employes. Mrs. Susan M. Dorsey rules the system as I write, and you will have a chance to watch her in action. For the moment it may suffice to record that for thirty years she has been a member of the Baptist Temple, Reverend J. Whitcomb Brougher, pastor. When “Billy” Sunday came to Los Angeles, some people found fault with him, and Rev. Brougher rushed to his defense, describing Sunday’s critics in the following highly educational language:

The dirty, low-down, contemptible, weazen-brained, impure-hearted, shrivelled-souled, gossiping devils do not deserve to be noticed.... Scandal-mongers, gossip-lovers, reputation-destroyers, hypocritical, black-hearted, green-eyed slanderers.... Corrupt, devil-possessed, vile debauchés.... Immoral, sin-loving, vice-practicing, underhanded sneaks.... Carrion-loving buzzards and foul-smelling skunks.

If anyone wishes to take charge of one hundred and seventy-six thousand school children under the Black Hand, he may learn from this how to train himself; for better remembering, I have put the directions into a poem:

Five days in the week

Teach Latin and Greek;

On Sundays, an hour,

Go listen to Brougher;

And seven days weekly

Obey Mammon meekly.

CHAPTER VI
THE TEACHERS’ SOVIETS

It is the thesis of the business men who run our educational system that the schools are factories, and the children raw material, to be turned out thoroughly standardized, of the same size and shape, like biscuits or sausages. To these business men the teachers are servants, or “hands,” whose duty is the same as in any other factory—to obey orders, and mind their own business, and be respectful to their superiors. Whenever by any chance teachers dare to have ideas of their own, or especially to ask for higher wages, these teachers are treated precisely as we have seen labor unions treated by the Black Hand of Southern California.

In 1916 and 1917, something happened which shook the teachers of Los Angeles into action; their wages were suddenly cut to about forty per cent of what they had been before. Or, to put it in the more common formula, the cost of everything the teachers had to buy with their money increased a hundred and thirty per cent; and meantime their wages remained as in 1914. They were unable to live, and fifty-six per cent of them were forced to do additional outside work. So the teachers’ associations began a salary campaign, which for the first time brought them out of the classrooms and into contact with the real life of Los Angeles. The campaign lasted intermittently for four or five years, and the outcome of it was tragedy for the teachers and comedy for the reader.

One of the purposes for which Mrs. Dorsey had been made superintendent was to hold the salaries down; and in her effort to break the resistance of the teachers, she served notice upon them that they must sign their contracts for the next year before the end of the old term—and this although legally they had until twenty days after the end of the term. She would be very sorry not to see their faces next year, she told them, and smiled amiably. When some said that they did not want to return, her smile was still amiable. “You’ll be back,” she said. “Teachers have gone out before this and tried to do something else.”

The president of the City Teachers’ Club made herself obnoxious by calling a meeting of the teachers for four o’clock one afternoon—that is to say, after the closing hour of the schools. Mrs. Dorsey, desiring to forestall her, closed the schools at half past one that afternoon. Hitherto Mrs. Dorsey had maintained that the schools must never be closed for special occasions; but now she closed them, and called the teachers together at half past one to listen to an address of her own. Some teachers thought it was her idea that they should be tired out and go home before their own meeting at four o’clock!

But the dissatisfaction of the teachers did not abate. A hundred of the best had left, and three hundred more were refusing to renew their contracts for the coming year; so the business men realized that some concession had to be made. Manifestly, it would not do to let it come as a result of teacher agitation; it must be due to the loving concern of business men. Mr. Sylvester Weaver, head of the “education committee” of the Chamber of Commerce, was called in, and he organized a committee of leading citizens, including Harry Haldeman, president of the Better America Federation. Somebody had “put over” on the teachers a publicity agent, a gentleman with a big cigar in his mouth and a gold watch-chain across his waistcoat. He now advised the teachers to drop their agitation and allow the business men to handle it; let the grand committee retire and do some grand thinking. So for five weeks the teachers preserved an awed silence.

They wanted a flat raise of a thousand dollars a year, and they proved that this amount was not enough to raise the lowest salary to ante-war standards. The committee, when it finally emerged from its thinking-bee, endorsed this demand; but at once the business men set up a howl—and so Mr. Weaver wrote to the board of education that he regarded the thousand dollars increase for teachers as a great and noble ideal to be worked for—in the course of time! The committee went before the board of supervisors, which said that it would be impossible for the teachers to have that much money; the committee went before the board of education, which said there was no use asking what the supervisors refused. The discontent of the teachers burst into flame again; the committee retired and did more thinking; and finally it was announced that the taxpayers of Los Angeles intended to perform an act of unprecedented generosity toward the teachers—every single one was to have a raise of three hundred dollars a year!

This amount made the average salary just one-half what it was before the war; and in a month or two rents went up and absorbed most of this. One landlord said to a teacher friend of mine: “You’ve just got a raise, and I’m going to have my share!” Recently the Chamber of Commerce of Hollywood invited the hungry teachers to a banquet, and informed them that for the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year they should learn to live on respect. On the place-cards of the hungry teachers they printed “A Tribute”:

To the Teachers of Tomorrow’s Manhood and Womanhood:

To you, who bless mankind by the devotion of your lives to a noble vocation, we declare our gratitude! In your charge we have placed the responsibility of tomorrow, and your performance of that sacred duty makes us all your debtors. Your calling is the highest in the social order; your reward is the most valued of possessions—respect.

The advantage of this salary campaign to the teachers was not the money, but the education they got. For the first time a few of them began to think about their board of education, and who was on it, and why. Some even took up the suggestion that the teachers’ organizations should affiliate with the American Federation of Labor. What indignation this excited in our “open-shop” city should hardly need telling; the Better America Federation set forth its ideas in a two-column advertisement in the newspapers of San José:

Teachers must keep aloof alike from politics and industrial discussions. Teachers are beginning to be regarded as wards of the State. Teachers, like soldiers, owe their first and only allegiance to the State.

The faculty at Jefferson High School decided that they would like to hear both sides on this problem of affiliation with labor, so they made up a questionnaire, and sent it, first, to fifty teachers’ organizations which were affiliated with the American Federation of Labor; second, to fifty which were not affiliated; and third, to all those which had been affiliated and had withdrawn. This would seem calculated to bring out all sides in the discussion; but the board of education issued a peremptory order that the procedure should cease. I have a written report of this incident from the teacher who interviewed Mr. Helm, the banker president of the board. Here is one paragraph:

Mr. Helm spoke very decidedly against the committee’s right to continue its investigation, stating that its plans were “propaganda of the worst sort.” He said the board had told the teachers what they (the teachers) were to do, and that was the end of it. He declared there was but one side of the question of injecting anything to do with “labor” into any teachers’ organization. He said it was impertinence to ask the board what it thought about such a matter, because it had put itself on record in no uncertain terms. He said the board reflected the “will of the people” in this regard. When questioned as to who “the people” are, he replied, such concerns as the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association and the Chamber of Commerce, “which are responsible for the upbuilding of the city.” He said when it was suggested to have “that man Stillman” (president of the American Federation of Teachers) to speak before the teachers at institute, these representative business men of Los Angeles asked, “You’re not going to permit that, are you?” And he told them, “No, indeed!” He remarked that the board expects the teachers to see to it that “labor” does not get any recognition in the teaching profession.

Some of the teachers now decided there ought to be a different sort of people on the school board, and they called in a group of liberal citizens to their help. A committee met, and a representative ticket was nominated, and a house-to-house campaign was carried on. The Black Hand opposed it, but not very ardently—a circumstance which would have awakened the suspicion of the teachers, if they had not been so new to public life. The entire “teachers’ ticket,” as it was called, was elected in the spring of 1921; and to the consternation of the poor teachers, two of the members resigned, and three others went over to the Black Hand, and so the board was deadlocked three to three, and nothing could be done. The board spent the rest of its term arguing over the choosing of a seventh member. The three liberal members had one candidate, Dr. Oxnam, a public-minded clergyman; while the three Black Hand members brought in a new candidate every week, until they had suggested most of the Tories in Southern California. Their favorite candidate was a brother-in-law of Harry Chandler of the “Times”; and after him they had three ex-presidents of the Chamber of Commerce!

One of the guiding thoughts of the liberal campaign had been that teachers know something about teaching. They now prepared a timid proposal for a “Teachers’ Advisory Council,” to consult with the superintendent and the assistants as to the welfare of the children and the schools. Such councils exist in many cities in America, and the teachers of Los Angeles thought their plan would be welcomed by their new “liberal” board of education. So little did they understand the methods of the Black Hand! One morning the “Times” came out with a frightful story, all the way across several columns; there was an underground conspiracy among the teachers of Los Angeles to establish a “teachers’ soviet”! A group of blood-thirsty “Reds” were scheming to take control of the schools from the duly elected board of education, and have the taxpayers’ money spent and administered by labor unions!

One of the teachers who was active in this movement, and who in a long editorial was branded as a dangerous “radical,” was Miss Wilhelmina Van de Goorberg. This, as you will note, is a terrifying foreign-sounding name; but it wasn’t foreign enough for the “Times,” which made it Von instead of Van. This lady’s parents came from Holland when she was a child, and the “Times” staff know her very well; but they changed her from innocent Dutch into devilish Prussian!

The Black Hand was sending Colonel Andrew Copp, whose ideas on education we have learned, to denounce the “teachers’ soviets” before the City Club and the Woman’s City Club. The Chamber of Commerce resolved to make an “impartial investigation” of the question, and appointed a committee, and a teacher was invited to appear before it to defend the new idea. Two teachers went, and found Colonel Copp on hand. The teachers were permitted to speak briefly, and then they were questioned, in tones that might have been used to naughty pupils. “Suppose the board of education refuses to carry out the orders of your teachers’ councils, what are you going to do then?”—and so on. Colonel Copp spoke at length, making a series of false statements; after which he packed up his papers and marched out, refusing to answer a single question. The chairman declared the meeting adjourned, without permitting the teachers even to deny the falsehoods!

This was a regular habit of Colonel Copp, it appears; a group of high school teachers interviewed him after one of his addresses, and pointed out to him a number of flat misstatements he had made. He said he would “investigate”; but a day or two later he repeated the misstatements, and refused to correct them. When a teacher asked him how he could do such a thing, he turned his back upon her.

For months the “Times” continued its denunciations of the “teachers’ soviets”; and, of course, they succeeded in crushing the hydra-headed monster. There come a hundred thousand new people into this community every year, and these people know nothing about local matters except what they read in the “Times.” When the “Times” tells them day after day that there is a band of secret conspirators, in sympathy with Moscow, trying to undermine the school system and destroy the morals of the children, they really believe it, and go to the polls and make their little “x” marks on the ballot, according to the pattern set before them in the “Times”! And so it is that four thousand highly trained experts are denied all opportunity to have effective say concerning the education of the children.

CHAPTER VII
A PRAYER FOR FREEDOM

There is an election of the school board in Los Angeles every two years. The Black Hand laid their plans to elect a complete board in the spring of 1923; they went at the job in grim earnest, sparing neither trouble nor expense, and the story of what they did reads like a chapter from a muckraking novel.

The ruling group held a series of meetings: Harry Chandler of the “Times”; “Eddie” Dickson of the “Express,” evening newspaper of the Black Hand; Captain Fredericks, congressman-elect of the Black Hand; Harry Haldeman, president of the Better America Federation; E. P. Clark, proprietor of one of our biggest hotels, and principal financial backer of the Better America Federation—these and half a dozen others constituted themselves “the Committee of One Thousand” for the purpose of electing a “citizens’ ticket” of seven members for the school board. A little later they decided to expand into “the Committee of Ten Thousand”—this in spite of the fact that at no one of their meetings were they able to collect more than thirty-seven people!

Their ticket comprised an assortment of hard-boiled reactionaries. At the top of the list stood Jerry Muma, their most active representative on the previous board. Mr. Muma runs a big insurance business; and just as the campaign was getting under way there was made public the affidavit of a prominent architect in the city, to the effect that Mr. F. O. Bristol, agent for Muma and likewise a candidate for the school board, had come to the architect soliciting insurance, and pointing out that Jerry Muma, as head of the building committee of the school board, controlled much valuable business of an architectural nature. “Mr. Muma believes in reciprocity,” said Mr. Bristol, significantly. This affidavit caused the Black Hand to take Jerry Muma from the head of its ticket; but they left Mr. Bristol!

Also they left on their ticket Mr. Frederick Feitshans, president of the Los Angeles Desk Company, in spite of the fact that this gentleman admitted to a committee of the teachers that he was at present selling many thousands of dollars’ worth of furniture to the schools of Los Angeles, and that while under the law he could not sell it to the schools after he became a member of the board, there was nothing to prevent his selling it to an agent, and this agent selling it to the schools. As reward for Mr. Feitshans’ refinement of sensibility, the gang members of the old board did their best to jam through a contract with the Los Angeles Desk Company for seventeen thousand dollars’ worth of furniture before the new board came in!

Also, there was Mrs. Lucia Macbeth, wife of the vice-president and general manager of our biggest cement company—and this with fourteen million dollars’ worth of new buildings to be handled by the new board! A terrible discovery concerning Mrs. Macbeth came out during the campaign: she smoked cigarettes! She admitted this to a committee of clergymen who visited her, but promised that if she were elected to the board she would give up smoking; and naturally the church people of Los Angeles could not lose such an opportunity to bring a lost sheep into the fold.

Also, there was Mr. Odell, a lawyer, one of the members of the old board, who had voted “right,” and who, as a Mason, brought many votes; a retired hay and grain merchant, who stated naively to the committee of teachers that he was tired of playing golf and wanted something to do; the wife of a real estate and insurance man; and another lawyer, who represented the bond house of Mr. Babcock, the gentleman who was selected by Captain Fredericks as campaign manager to put this reactionary school ticket into office. Mr. Babcock’s firm got the handling of several millions of the school bonds; and this firm sends out literature, signed by Mr. Babcock, attacking government ownership, and advising the public to put its money into private enterprises. So you see how Big Business and the schools tie up! On this board almost every kind of interest which preys on the school system was boldly represented; and to elect it every power the Black Hand could wield, both inside and outside the system, was wielded, and every slander that could be whispered concerning the opposition was spread upon the front page of the “Times.”

“No politics in the schools!” runs the formula; which means, quite simply, that no one must oppose the Black Hand. The rumor was spread that the “teachers’ board” was pledged to oust Mrs. Dorsey; and so for every teacher the issue was one of “loyalty to the chief.” Many were intimidated—I know one teacher who was told by her principal that if she gave out literature for the “teachers’ ticket” she would be summoned before the grand jury! Others were bought with promises of promotion—the system is honeycombed with intrigue of that sort. The principals’ clubs went boldly into politics, cheered on by the “Times” and the “Express.” One school director, a pet of Mrs. Dorsey, used the school time and the school’s long distance telephone for a whole day calling the Masons in the school system to a meeting at which they were told how to vote.

I have before me a letter from a school principal telling me how a certain political woman came to him, offering him, in exchange for his support in the gang, a written promise of a high school principalship. This offer was turned down and the principal wrote his wife, who owns a dairy: “Keep the cows. We may need them.”

In apologizing for telling so much about the harbor strike, I promised to prove that the same men who smashed this strike were running the school system of Los Angeles, and smashing the teachers. Now comes the proof. As it happened, the campaign for the election of the school board was going on all through the harbor strike and the formation of our Civil Liberties Union; and among the few who came forward to stand for this union was the Reverend G. Bromley Oxnam, pastor of the Church of All Nations, and candidate for the school board on the “teachers’ ticket.” At our first mass meeting of protest, held in Los Angeles three days after the release of Hopkins, Hardyman, Kimbrough and myself, Mr. Oxnam was asked to lead the singing of “America” and to open the proceedings with a prayer. This he did; and so all the fury of the enemy was turned upon him. The kept preachers of the Black Hand denounced him from their pulpits, and also before the Ministerial Union, and before the City Club. Nothing more was needed to defeat a candidate for the school board than to associate him with Upton Sinclair, notorious Socialist and muckraker. Day after day the “Times” pounded upon this theme, both in editorials and in news. The Better America Federation circulated alleged stenographic transcripts of speeches by Mr. Oxnam, which “transcripts” were made up in their own offices, and were the opposite of Mr. Oxnam’s beliefs.

Understand, Mr. Oxnam was not the head of this ticket; he was only one of seven. But from the day he stood upon the Civil Liberties platform, the ticket became the “Oxnam ticket,” and his candidacy was an effort of Upton Sinclair and the “soviets” to take possession of the schools. All the minor organizations of the Black Hand, the business clubs, the women’s organizations, the little educational bosses—all these adopted resolutions denouncing the conspiracy to turn the schools of the city over to the “Reds.” There is very good reason to believe that the praying of a prayer for the Constitution of the United States not merely cost Mr. Oxnam his election to the school board, but cost his associates their election as well. So, at the risk of making my story too long, I print the prayer that Mr. Oxnam prayed, and that a stenographer took down for his protection:

Our Father, we lift our voices to Thee in Thanksgiving. We are thankful that Thou hast created us thinking beings. We are thankful that we are not mere automatons, but that Thou hast given to us freedom of choice, and that in large measure our own destiny and that of our brothers lies in our own hands. We pray Thee, that just as Thou hast granted to us the right to think and to speak, so too we may grant to our citizens the right to think and to speak, to the end that that glorious day may come at last when all men share the abundant life Jesus of Nazareth died to bring to men.

Give to us, we pray, the spirit of tolerance. May we be willing to listen to our brother with whom we disagree. But O God, as we pray for tolerance, we pray too that we may be men of conviction. Give to us an open mind, but give us also the strength to stand for our convictions even if it take a Calvary Cross to win them. May we never bow the knee before insolent might. Help us to be tender and just, loving and righteous, never turning aside from the needy. Give to us that virtue that was Christ’s—forgiveness. May we even love those who despitefully use us. Keep before us ever the example of the One who was despised and rejected of men, yet who could pray forgiveness for those who crucified him.

We thank Thee for America, her traditions, her history, her place in the world. We thank Thee for our forefathers who won for us the liberties we so easily inherit. Give to us their spirit. Fire us with the desire to bring to men the ideals for which they died. Give us Life, give us Liberty, give us Happiness. Give us the strength to stand for Life, and Liberty, and Happiness. We thank Thee for the Constitution of our Republic. We thank Thee that the people united to establish justice, to insure domestic tranquility, and promote the general welfare. May we stand worthy of them today. Give to us the courage today to stand as Americans insisting upon the maintenance of those principles upon which our Republic was founded.

In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

CHAPTER VIII
THE PRICE OF INDEPENDENCE

There has existed for the past twenty years inside the school system a secret oath-bound society of the school men known as the “Owls,” whose members pledged themselves to consider first the interests of this group. They served the Southern Pacific Railroad in the old days when this machine ran the state; they now serve the Santa Fé Railroad and the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association and the Chamber of Commerce and the Better America Federation, and the other organizations of the Black Hand. For twenty years the system had one man, an assistant superintendent named Lickley, who declined to join this society. He had also refused to make the various anti-social pledges which the Better America Federation has required of every candidate for the school board and of every school official. In the 1921 election Mrs. Dorsey pleaded with Dr. Lickley, advising him “as a mother” not to support the “teachers’ ticket.” He supported it; and so in the interests of “harmony” it was necessary that he be driven out of the system. The intrigue against him came to a head during the election campaign, and became an issue in this campaign.

In telling the story, I have to devote two paragraphs to some Los Angeles school principals. I apologize for taking up your time with people you never heard of before, and will never want to hear of again. But you will find, as we go on, that the school system of America is one system; when you read about school principals in Los Angeles, you will be learning about school principals in every other big American city. Also, I would suggest that if men are important enough to be put in charge of your children, they ought to be important enough for you to know about.

In the course of Dr. Lickley’s duties it became necessary for him to consider charges against a principal by the name of Doyle. Seven witnesses made affidavit that this principal had kept liquor in the school building, contrary to law; that he had offered them this liquor, and that his habits were generally known to the students, and were a cause of demoralization in the school. It was testified that this liquor had been brought to Doyle by Italian boys, whose parents were making it, and that these boys had thus obtained immunity from school duties and from punishment. It was also testified that he had knocked down David Rutberg, a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy, by striking him in the eye. It was further charged that Doyle, while principal of an evening school, took other teachers away from their classes and spent the time with them gambling in the basement. For this and other reasons Dr. Lickley recommended Doyle for dismissal. We may complete this part of the story by stating that Mrs. Dorsey and her school board have blocked every effort for a hearing of these charges. Doyle is still in the system, and the board has jumped him over two entire divisions, and elected him principal of one of the biggest schools in the city. When this caused a scandal, the men who had made the charges against Doyle were summoned to the superintendent’s office, and efforts were made to browbeat them into withdrawing their sworn statements.

Immediately after Dr. Lickley’s action in the Doyle case, charges of insubordination and disloyalty to the system were preferred against Dr. Lickley by Doyle and others. I will list these others: first, a man named Lacy, whom Dr. Lickley had dropped from the principalship of a school upon the charge that he had come to school in a state of intoxication, that he was unable to perform his duties, and that he had misappropriated the funds of the Schoolmasters’ Club. Next, one Cronkite, who, according to Dr. Lickley, was demoted from the position of supervisor, because of “incompetence, laziness and objectionable conduct to other members of the department.” Next, a principal named McKnight, who, according to Dr. Lickley, left the principalship of one school because of “serious and reprehensible misconduct.” Next, one Dunlap, who was charged by Dr. Lickley with having stolen public property; also with having carried on a private business as insurance agent in school and in the board of education offices, urging the employes under his supervision “to buy insurance, oil stocks, automobiles, real estate, etc.” Another man, I am told, had been disciplined by his Masonic brothers for taking a woman upstate with him. Another was turned out of a night school because the young women teachers would not stand his conduct toward them; he was put in charge of the jail night school—it being apparently assumed that such pupils would not be troubled by his morals. During the campaign the men under charges were in conference with Mrs. Dorsey, enjoying her confidence and carrying out her plans. I want to make clear my own position as regards the matter: I do not say that these charges are true; I say that they have been published by responsible persons, and that neither Mrs. Dorsey nor her school board have cared enough about the good name of the schools to answer the charges or bring the men to trial.

Mr. Herbert Clark, recently promoted by Mrs. Dorsey, came to Mr. Bettinger with a proposition: they had “got the goods” on Lickley; they wanted to take him out and put in one of their own gang; they would let him stay as an assistant, but with minor duties; and if Mr. Bettinger would consent to this program, they would make him the next superintendent of schools in Los Angeles. Mr. Bettinger refused, and then the gang took the charges before the Municipal League, which asked to have them in writing, and to have them sworn to; but instead of doing this, the gang induced a poor old lady to bring the charges before the county board of education, asking that Dr. Lickley’s license as a teacher be revoked. The old lady had understood that the charges would be secret—but whiff! they were spread out in the “Times”!

This county board was a gang affair—two of them members of the “Owls,” one of them the brother of an old Southern Pacific Railroad henchman, who ran the recent Water Power campaign for the Black Hand. A third member was the father of Lacy, one of Dr. Lickley’s accusers! In the course of the election campaign, this accuser went to a meeting of the Los Angeles City Teachers’ Club, and started to speak. His right to speak was challenged, because he was not a member; whereupon he paid his fee, received his membership card, and made his speech. It proved to be a series of false statements concerning Dr. Oxnam—that Oxnam had been in jail recently, and that he had been barred from speaking in the city of Long Beach. Some of the teachers objected, and succeeded in silencing Lacy, until Oxnam could appear to answer the charges. Oxnam wrote, demanding that Lacy produce his evidence, and challenging Lacy to appear at the next meeting of the teachers. Lacy declined to appear, whereupon the Teachers’ Club expelled him.

There were two sets of charges against Dr. Lickley, one set of which they published, and the other of which they whispered. They had been shadowing him with detectives for years; they had followed him on train journeys and steamer trips, and wherever he drove in his automobile. Sometimes there were as many as four people devoting their attention to him; one of these men got drunk and admitted that he was shadowing Dr. Lickley for the gang. They were trying to get what they call a “woman story” on him; as we go from city to city you will find this such a common device of the Black Hand that you will learn to take it for granted.

The Lickley stories served their purpose—of helping to beat the “teachers’ ticket.” The candidates of the gang were elected without exception, and Dr. Oxnam came out next to the bottom of the poll. The charges against Dr. Lickley were dismissed, on motion of the attorney for the opposition; whereupon Superintendent Dorsey informed Dr. Lickley that if he still stayed in the system she would put him in a solitary room in the Grand Avenue School, with curtailed duties, without a stenographer, and without even a telephone. It happens that Dr. Lickley is a lawyer, and can earn far more at his profession than he was getting in the school system. He had before him a long and nasty fight, with the cards stacked against him. He tendered his resignation, which the new board accepted.

Some maintain that he should have stayed and fought it out. Suffice it to say that one of the factors upon which the Black Hand counts, when it puts its scandal bureau to work, is the probability that men of refinement will choose to go their own way as private citizens, in preference to having slanders about them published in the newspapers. If you take that to mean that Dr. Lickley was guilty and ran away, all I can answer is what Mr. Bettinger tells me; that he rented a room in the upper part of his home to a typist, who, hearing him speak of Dr. Lickley, remarked: “Why, I typed all the reports of the people who investigated his life; he didn’t do anything wrong.”

CHAPTER IX
THE REGIME OF RECIPROCITY

We now have the Black Hand in undisputed control of the school system of Los Angeles; their seven dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries meet, frequently in secret session, and carry out the will of their masters. Let us see what this means for the schools, the teachers, the children, and the public.

First of all, graft: it means that the handling of twelve million dollars a year is in the hands of people who have no conception of any other ideal in life but that of money-making. They would, of course, deny this indignantly; while denying it, they will be teaching the children in the economics classes that pecuniary self-seeking is the only principle upon which a civilization can be built. They will be glorifying greed by high-sounding phrases, such as “individualism,” “laissez-faire,” “freedom of contract”; they will be ridiculing any other ideal as “utopian,” the product of “theorists” and “dreamers.”

Here are more than nine hundred school buildings, and the system has never had a real building expert. The best architects in the city do not trouble to bid upon school buildings; they know that these contracts go to those who, in the phrase of Jerry Muma, “believe in reciprocity.” The whole business system of the schools is antiquated and tied up in red tape, all of which is sacred because it represents somebody’s privilege. The 1921 board ordered a business survey of the schools, employing the financial expert of the State Board of Control; a minute and detailed report on the school system was made—and was turned down and suppressed by the gang.

Quite recently Mr. F. W. Hansen, purchasing agent for the schools, resigned his position, stating that the system was “an institutional mad-house”; all his efforts to save money for the taxpayer had been thwarted by the business manager. Mr. Hansen had wished to go out and develop additional[additional] sources of supply, as the purchasing agent of any commercial organization would do. He went directly to the manufacturers of ink-wells and saved from thirty to forty per cent. He cut the price of waste-baskets from $9.60 to $6.85 a dozen; and so on through a long list of savings.

But you see, if you go directly to the manufacturers, you cut off the profits of jobbers and wholesalers, and these are prominent members of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association, who “believe in reciprocity” and “the encouragement of home industry.” When you buy from novelty houses for $38.00 calendars which the local dealers are selling for $100, you are causing unemployment for a bookkeeper in Los Angeles, who keeps track of this transaction for the local business men. Still worse heresy, when you go to San Francisco and buy reed for $1.50 which costs $3.53 in Los Angeles, you are boosting the most bitter rival of our City of the Black Angels. When you buy lubricating oil for twenty-seven and a half cents a gallon, which meets the test better than that which the city has been getting for fifty-four cents a gallon, you have some oil men on your neck. Mr. Hansen had a long fight with his superiors before he was even permitted to sign his own letters asking for prices in transactions such as this.[this.]

Mr. Hansen insisted upon getting competitive bids for the supplying of colored crayons. The business manager told him to “lay off this”; the city had been using Prang’s crayons, and there was none so good. The bid on Prang’s water colors had been forty dollars; when the competition started it came down to twenty-five; there were other brands offered for eighteen, and the art supervisor of the schools made tests, and could find no difference in quality between them. The old board split on this issue—the members of the “teachers’ ticket” stood out, trying to save the taxpayers $1,204.07 on this single purchase. The new board is now in, the city is paying the higher prices, and somebody is getting the “rake-off.”

And yet, in spite of this orgy of spending, the teachers cannot get supplies. I have before me the Los Angeles “School Journal” for October 24, 1921, giving a report of a committee of teachers which had been appointed to investigate the question of school supplies. Here are six pages of closely printed details, covering every sort of school material. Some forty or fifty teachers testify. No one knows when supplies ordered will be received, the time is usually from six months to a year. Tissue paper was “called for repeatedly for two years. First amount received one year ago.” Desks ordered in the spring of 1918 had not been received two and a half years later. Half a class in agriculture was idle, because garden tools were missing eleven months after ordering. Text-books in English for the teacher’s desk received “sometimes six months later, sometimes a year.” Again, “I have been asking for bookkeeping desks for five years.”

I talked with the head of a department, who had kept a careful record, and had never got supplies in less than six months, and sometimes had waited two years and a half. There were some repairs to be done to laboratory tables, and application for this work was made in the spring, so that it could be done during the summer vacation. In the fall, after school had started, along came the carpenters and the painters to do this work. Said this teacher: “The city was paying me fifteen dollars a day to teach two hundred pupils, and then it paid another fifteen dollars a day to workmen to keep me from teaching the pupils.”

All this is petty graft; and the thing that really counts is Big Business, which is not considered graft. This board has the placing of magnificent new high schools which the city is building for the children of the rich, and which determine the population and price of real estate for whole districts. It goes without saying that these schools are put where the active speculators want them; three such schools are now going up in districts where there is practically no population at present. Meanwhile the old, unsanitary fire-traps in the slums are left overcrowded and without repairs. They have passed a regulation districting the city, and compelling the children to attend school in their own district. The children of the poor may not travel and attend the schools of the rich! This year there are no schools at all for many of the children of the poor, and sixty thousand of them are on part time.

The reason for this is the ceaseless campaign of Big Business to starve the schools. In the columns of the “Times” you will read that the “Times” is a friend of the schools; but the teachers noted that this did not keep the “Times” from backing the treacherous program of the “Taxpayers’ Protective Association,” which lobbied through the state legislature the notorious Bill 1013, which forbade any community to increase its tax rate more than five per cent over that of the year before. The lobbyists of the association solemnly assured the teachers’ representatives at the state capital that this bill would not in any way affect the schools, and so they let it get by. Then, to their consternation, the teachers discovered that it would completely hamstring the schools! The tax rate of the previous year had been unusually low, because there had been a surplus; now, under this new law, most of the schools would have to close down.

The teachers got busy and circulated petitions, and defeated this law by referendum. Then the Taxpayers’ Protective Association tried to throw out the referendum, and the teachers had to pay an attorney a thousand dollars of their own money to argue the case before the Supreme Court. You will not be surprised to hear that the principal backer of this Taxpayers’ Protective Association is Mr. E. P. Clark, principal backer of the Better America Federation; in other words, the association is simply one of the aliases of the Black Hand!

And now this Black Hand has elected its own governor of the state, on a program of “economy,” which means the starving of every form of public welfare activity. The school appropriations have been cut to such an extent that the teachers’ colleges are crippled and the whole system is in despair. You see, what money California has to spare just now must go into a new state penitentiary here in the South; the Black Hand is planning more campaigns against “suspicion of criminal syndicalism.” A couple of months ago, while I sat in my cell at the Wilmington police-station, my fellow prisoner, Hugh Hardyman, quoted a remark: “I would rather be in jail laying the foundations of liberty than at liberty laying the foundations of jails.” In California you take your choice between these two.

CHAPTER X
THE SPY SYSTEM

It goes without saying that in such a school system promotion goes by favoritism. The system of examining and grading teachers at the present time is a farce. These examinations are partly written, partly oral, and partly references; the references are submitted as confidential, and one of the assistant superintendents marks them, without any assistance. So far as the oral examinations are concerned, it is purely a question of getting before an examiner who is your friend. Mrs. Dorsey, the superintendent, will say: “Send So-and-so to my committee”; and it will be done.

Mr. Bettinger, while assistant superintendent, discovered that the deputy superintendent was giving the clerk a list of names of those who were to be passed as favored by people of influence. He tells me how later on Jerry Muma, at that time “boss” of the board, came to him with a friend whose daughter desired to take the examination for high school teacher. Mr. Bettinger explained the routine; the examination must be taken in such and such a way, etc. But Mr. Muma was not satisfied. He said that he had heard these matters could be arranged more expeditiously. Finding that Mr. Bettinger did not take the hint, he said: “Wait a minute,” and went out. He was gone five minutes, and came back, saying: “It will be all right; Mr. Shafer (an assistant) will have this young woman come before him.” Mr. Muma, you remember, is the dealer in life insurance who “believes in reciprocity.”

Mrs. Dorsey is a very devout church member, and the churches are strong in her support; so when a woman teacher came to her, complaining of having been seduced by the principal of her school, Mrs. Dorsey was greatly incensed. When the teacher’s story was substantiated by the wife of the principal, Mrs. Dorsey—so I am informed by Dr. Lickley—summoned the man to her office and demanded his resignation. But she had been led in her excitement to overlook the realities of politics in her school system. This principal had a powerful friend, an ex-judge who was high in the councils of the Black Hand. He called on Mrs. Dorsey and presumably explained to her the concrete facts about the administration of schools. Anyhow, the matter was suddenly dropped; and Mrs. Dorsey has just been presented with a reappointment for four years, with a salary raise from eight thousand to ten thousand a year.

The thing for which I indict this elderly lady superintendent is her pitiable subservience to the power of wealth, and the glorifying of commercialism in her school system. She has made the schools a “boosting” agency for reaction; it would be no exaggeration to say that she has handed them over to the bankers to be used as a collection agency to get the children’s money. One teacher tells me how her principal came back in great excitement from a meeting of principals summoned by Mrs. Dorsey, at which the details of a “thrift campaign” had been explained. All the children must start savings banks at once; the Chamber of Commerce was furnishing the banks, also posters, which must be put up in every schoolroom. Some time later the principal came into a room much disturbed; there was no poster up in that room, and what was the matter? The teacher explained that the wind had blown it down; it had been up for two months. The principal fussed about, and would not leave until it had been tacked up again.

The children were hounded to start their bank accounts; some were taken out and paraded around the block, with banners reporting the percentages of bank accounts in each class. The teachers also were hounded; you were a failure if your children did not reach a certain percentage. A man from the bankers’ association came around to make a speech: “The principal is going to give you a bank; the superintendent expects that every one of you will have a dollar saved up.” And every month there was a bulletin from Mrs. Dorsey. Meantime the bankers’ association, in the literature it sent out, was explaining that it was spending more than one dollar per child upon this school campaign, but it would pay well, because the children would get the bank habit.

Mrs. Dorsey has a formula of subservience which she is accustomed to repeat to her teachers and subordinates: “We must please the business men, otherwise they will not vote the bonds to keep our schools going.” That she has grounds for her fears was shown by the statement of Mr. Edwards, self-appointed financial boss of the school board. The teachers and the public were demanding a fifteen-million-dollar bond issue for new schools; but when the proposition came before the board, it had been changed to nine millions, and Mr. Edwards’ explanation was simple: the heads of the Chamber of Commerce had drawn a line through the fifteen and made it nine! “That’s what we’ll vote just now,” they said; and as a result of those strokes of the pencil, sixty thousand children are now condemned to part-time instruction!

If you think this a matter of small importance, let me tell you of one teacher who had a class of incorrigible children. Out of nineteen boys, seventeen confessed to her that they had burglarized houses or stores. The ages of these boys were from thirteen to sixteen, and in the majority of cases their mothers had been compelled by poverty to go to work outside the home. The boys would take the money they stole and go to beach resorts, and spend it all in one night. These boys had had three years of half-day school sessions, and told the teacher that they had started their careers of crime while turned out on the streets instead of being in school.

As I finish this book, Mrs. Dorsey issues a bulletin, informing all teachers that the schools are to celebrate a “Chamber of Commerce Week.” It is solemnly ordered that “children of the first five grades write to their father or guardian a letter on some phase of the work of the local Chamber of Commerce, or on the benefits to the city of the activities of that organization”; and teachers of all other grades shall “use the functions, activities, or achievements of the local Chamber of Commerce as suggestions for themes and orations. Pamphlets dealing with the activities of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce will be placed in the mail-boxes. The co-operation of principals and teachers is urged.”

I have before me a copy of the pamphlet in question. The Chamber of Commerce, which cut the school appropriation from fifteen million to nine million dollars, and put sixty thousand children on part time, now has the effrontery to state to all school teachers and pupils: “The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce has worked for every bond issue asked for by the Board of Education, until now the city has more than 900 public school buildings for its 176,000 children.” Upon learning of this “Chamber of Commerce Week,” the American Civil Liberties Union hastened to apply to the board for a “Civil Liberties Week,” and in a written statement afforded the board many reasons for making the children acquainted with the importance of protecting civil liberties. It goes without saying that the Board of Education of the Black Hand made haste to vote down this riotous proposition; and likewise another for a “union labor week.”

Of course there has been, and is, a campaign of terrorism to drive out the few rebel teachers from the system. One high school principal was told by Judge Bordwell that he would be promoted if he would remove several teachers accused of liberal ideas. When the principal said they were good teachers, the Judge said: “Can’t you get something on their morals?”

That the Black Hand directs spying by the school children on their teachers is something you do not have to take my word for; you may take the word of Mr. Harry Haldeman, president of the Better America Federation. Speaking at a banquet given by his supporters in the Alexandria Hotel in Los Angeles, Mr. Haldeman said in substance: investigators have been placed in various schools and colleges in this state and throughout the United States, whose business it is to take note of the utterances of teachers, professors, or students, and report to the headquarters of the Federation. If any utterances are reported which are not to the liking of the Federation, means will be taken to have the teachers or professors discharged. So far as the students are concerned, they will be shown the error of their ways. If they prove obstinate and fail to take heed, steps are to be taken to prevent their getting employment. And if you should find any of these statements incredible, let me add that Mr. Haldeman made the same speech in many other places; he made it at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, and you will find in “The Goose-Step” what the San Francisco “Call” published about it.

They control the board, the superintendents, the teachers, and the pupils; they even control the parents. For twenty years Los Angeles has had an excellent group of organizations called Parent-Teachers’ Associations; the parents come to the school buildings for meetings with the teachers, to discuss the welfare of the schools. But this machinery has gone the way of everything else—it has been taken over by the Black Hand. I talked with a lady who was president of one of these branches, and saw the whole intrigue from the inside. There are prominent women, paid agents of the Better America Federation; while others are paid by the “Times” in the coin of prominence and applause. If you support the politics of the “Times,” you become “the distinguished Mrs. So-and-So”; your picture is printed, your speeches are quoted, and your honors are recited at length.

These agents of the Black Hand have their plans always laid in advance; they are aggressive, they pretend to know the laws and by-laws, and brush the ordinary parents out of the way. At one of the general meetings of the association they rushed through an endorsement of military training in the schools. There were only thirty or forty people present; no one had any warning of the program, nor any opportunity to discuss this important question; yet next morning this action was announced in the “Times” as representing the sentiments of thirty-one thousand parents! One lady, objecting to this procedure, brought up a discussion of the matter at her branch; she proposed that they should have speakers to present both sides of the question. Her principal was “furious” that she should have brought such a proposition up in his school.

In order to prevent the parents from having an effective voice, they have amended the constitution to read that there shall be “no interference with the administrative functions of the board of education”; so now, if there is anything they want to hush up, they simply call it “an administrative function of the board of education”! In order to keep the teachers from having any voice, they frequently call the business meetings at hours when the teachers are busy in classroom. One teacher who has spent something like thirty years in the system, tells me that he has never yet been able to attend a business meeting of the association in his school. The representatives of the school at these meetings are the principals and their office staff. The teachers pay one-third of the dues, they furnish the bulk of the program work—but they have nothing to say about policy.

“Politics” is strictly barred; but, as everywhere else throughout the system, this rule works only one way. The associations are forbidden to endorse any candidates; but during the recent election the “Times” announced that they had endorsed the candidates of the Black Hand—and when the “Times” says a thing, that thing might as well be true, because ninety-nine per cent of the public believes it. On another occasion these political women rushed through an endorsement of some of their judges, and Mrs. E. J. Quale, the press chairman, handed in her resignation in protest. The executive board accepted her resignation, but kept the fact out of the records and out of the newspapers—thus concealing Mrs. Quale’s protest from the membership.

“No politics in the P. T. A.” It was not “politics” when Harry Atwood, author of “Back to the Republic,” came to talk about the Constitution, and devoted nine-tenths of his time to attacking the initiative and referendum. The “politics” began when some one ventured to ask for a speaker who was known to favor the initiative. There is an executive committee for the purpose of controlling speakers, and no one could be permitted to speak unless his name had been approved by this committee.

The biggest issue in the state just now is that of public or private control of water power; the whole future depends upon this, and to keep the public in darkness concerning it is the one big purpose of the Black Hand, to which all other purposes are subordinated. So in this water power fight the control of the Parent-Teachers’ Association has been most clearly revealed. In the last election campaign the proposal to issue bonds for public development of water power was beaten by the corporations; subsequent investigation by the state legislature revealed the fact that the Southern California Edison Company, a private water power corporation, had contributed $107,605 to carry this campaign. They had paid $26,000 salary to a campaign manager, who had formed the “Women’s Committee of the Los Angeles Taxpayers Association.” He had a professional publicity agent, a woman, and “three or four other ladies who went around making speeches.” There was one item of $4,019 for “special literature,” signed with the name of the “Women’s Tax and Bond Study Club”—and this, according to the admission of the campaign manager, was for circulation among the Parent-Teachers’ Associations. During the campaign, the speakers for public ownership were barred; but now, by order of the superintendent, the Edison Company is taking its propaganda directly into the schools!

CHAPTER XI
LIES FOR CHILDREN

Needless to say, those who run this school machine for the Black Hand are vigilant to keep modern ideas from the children. They excluded the “Nation” and the “New Republic” from the high school libraries shortly after the war; and they have recently refused to rescind this action. There was a debate on the subject before the Friday Morning Club, a ladies’ organization, and Mrs. Chester C. Ashley, ex-member of the board of education, waved before the eyes of the horrified ladies the current issue of the “Nation,” June 6, 1923: let them inspect the cover and see what poison was prepared for the minds of their children:

UPTON SINCLAIR DEFENDS THE LAW

His Letter to the Law-breaking Chief of Police of Los Angeles

The Better America Federation picked out as its text-book of patriotism for the schools a work called “Vanishing Landmarks” by Leslie Shaw, ex-secretary of the treasury, a comical old Tory who glorifies the Constitution as a bulwark of special privilege. “Only Socialists, near Socialists, and Bolsheviki clamor for democracy,” declares Mr. Shaw; and he says it is wise for representatives of capital to be permitted to organize, and the only danger begins when federations of unions are formed. Incidentally he denounces, as part of the revolutionary program, the woman’s suffrage amendment! The Better America Federation spent twenty thousand dollars to put a copy of this book into the hands of every school teacher; they wanted it adopted as a text-book in all elementary schools—and this in a state where the women have had the ballot for twelve years! As one teacher remarked to me, the slogan, “Votes for Women,” is to be changed to “Lies for Children”!

For the Pilgrim Tri-Centennial the Better America Federation prepared a beautiful text-book for the schools, full of reactionary propaganda; this they gave away, and they had a list of eloquent orators, also to be given away. Then they produced a text-book “Back to the Republic,” by Harry Atwood, denouncing the initiative and referendum as treason to our forefathers. The publishers announce this as “The Outstanding Book of the Age,” and it was distributed to every teacher. Let me quote you a few of its theses: “Promiscuity, or free-love, is to the domestic world what democracy is to government.... What gluttony is to the individual, democracy is to government.... What drunkenness is to the individual, democracy is to government.... What discord is to music, democracy is to government.... What insanity is to thought, democracy is to government,” etc., etc. And understand, this in a text-book! Teachers were expected to compel little children to learn this by heart, and to recite it!

Next came “The Citadel of Freedom,” by Randolph Leigh, a product of Nicholas Murray Butler’s educational machine. It was written as a Columbia doctor’s thesis, and is a panegyric of the Constitution, in which every reactionary influence in our history is glorified, and every popular influence sneered at. I have read the galley proofs of this book, as submitted to the school board of Los Angeles, and they bear at the top the tell-tale label, “Times.” Mr. Leigh appeared personally before the board of education, offering to put a copy of this book into the hands of every student orator. He was backed by a committee, including Chandler of the “Times” and Haldeman of the Better America Federation, who offered a prize of fifteen hundred dollars, or “a de luxe summer tour of the Mediterranean country,” for the best oration by any high school student using this book and its references as source material. A liberal representative on the school board objected, saying that the students should have an opportunity to hear both sides. Mr. Leigh said that he had done all the research work. The board member answered: “Our students are trained to do their own research work.” And Mrs. Dorsey sat there and did not say one word in defense of her school system!

Reactionary teachers are appointed for the express purpose of repressing originality and independence in the students. What are their standards and ideals was charmingly revealed by one of them who was discussing a certain pupil with a friend of mine. This pupil was a “leader,” said the teacher; “I know she’s a good leader—you give her something to do and she’ll do it beautifully.” The consequences of such training are seen in the so-called “Ephebian Society,” an organization formed to interest the high school alumni in public service. The choicest of the high school graduates are picked out each year, and this is a great honor—while you are graduating. After that you discover it to be a farce; because the members of the society meet and the authorities in control forbid them to take up any vital subject whatever. The Ephebians meet in the rooms of the board of education, and are permitted to spend their time raising money for the Travelers’ Aid Society, or superintending the Newsboys’ Christmas Dinner! I talked with this year’s president of the society, Lee Payne; they will never get him again, he said.

This same young man told me of his experiences when he was selected to deliver the valedictory of his class. He asked to have a liberal teacher as his guide, but was compelled to have a reactionary teacher. She assigned to him a commonplace theme, and he rejected it, and wrote on the subject of “Labor’s Right to a Share in Industry.” When he brought in his address, the teacher refused to let him deliver it; it was “too Bolsheviki,” she said, and told him that when he went into a garden he must see the beautiful red roses, and not the thorns. She practically rewrote the address for the student, and he took it off and wrote it again. The controversy continued up to a day or two before commencement, when the boy finally had to deliver an address which did not represent his own convictions.

I have mentioned favoritism among the principals and teachers; needless to say, also, that children who come from poor homes, and especially the children of foreigners, are slighted. A boy came to see me, Clarence Alpert by name, a sensitive lad, conscientious and idealistic; with tears in his eyes he told me how he had been turned out of Lincoln High School by the principal, Miss Andrus. I was familiar with the name of this lady. In an address to the school assembly she had referred to “that notorious disloyalist and traitor, Upton Sinclair.” I wrote a letter to the lady in which I mentioned my support of the war—you may find it in “The Brass Check,” pages 205-7. I served notice upon her that she would make a retraction of her statements or face a libel suit, and she preferred the former alternative.

The boy whom she had now expelled had refused to salute the flag. He was a Socialist, and believed that the flag stood for capitalism. Miss Andrus sent for him, and stormed at him; he was a Russian Jew, and she knew his kind from her experience at Hull House. They were dirty, rotten scoundrels; they were people with no ideals and no country; they were cheap material, who could not be made into good citizens and were not entitled to an education. Miss Andrus tried her best to get young Alpert to name some of the teachers who had encouraged him in his ideas; the boy was threatened with immediate dismissal if he refused to name them, but in spite of the fact that he had “no ideals,” he stood firm! Finally he was given three days in which to make up his mind and salute the flag.

Then—so the boy explained to me—one of his teachers labored with him, explaining to him that he was under a misapprehension about the flag. To be sure it was used by capitalism at the present time, but that was only because it had been stolen; in reality the flag stood for the highest ideals ever conceived by mankind, and it was our business to preserve it for those ideals, and to take it away from the exploiters and rascals. Alpert agreed to that, and went back to Miss Andrus and told her that he had realized his mistake, and that he was now ready to salute the flag as she required. But she declared that he was a hypocrite and a coward, and should not stay in the school. I went to a friend of mine, a wealthy man who happens to be a liberal. He called up a member of the school board, who went to see Miss Andrus; so in two or three days the boy was restored to school, from which he has since been graduated.

The schools are starting in this fall with what they call “codified patriotism”; a whole outfit of flummery contrived by the American Legion and the professional hundred percenters. The flag must be exactly at the top of the staff, and you must raise it briskly, and lower it slowly and reverently; you must raise your hat with your right hand, and women must put their right hand over the heart. The legislature has passed a bill, requiring that American history shall be taught “from the American viewpoint”; no longer is it to be taught from the viewpoint of truth! The children are to learn that Alexander Hamilton was a good American, but the soft pedal will be put on Thomas Jefferson. They will not be taught that the Mexican War was a disgraceful foray of greed, and that Abraham Lincoln denounced it in Congress. Instead, they will be taught all about the “Red” menace—with the columns of the “Times” for source material. At last commencement time at least six addresses by students, dealing with this subject, were featured by the “Times” in its radio service, which is devoutly followed by hundreds of thousands of wage-slaves in our community. All these addresses, of course, had been carefully censored; one or two of them were “repeated by request,” and the announcement was made that you could have a printed copy of them by application to the “Times.”

CHAPTER XII
THE SCHOOLS OF MAMMON

What becomes of the children under this regime of the Black Hand? I have talked with scores of teachers, and their testimony is unanimous, that the children’s minds are on anything in the world but study. I choose the great “L. A. High,” because that is where the children of the rich attend. One parent, a woman of refinement and sense, has tried to keep the tastes of her daughter simple and wholesome, but she tells me it is impossible, because home influence counts for nothing against the overwhelming collective power of the mass. The child comes home thrilled with excitement, telling of what the other girls have; and she must have what they have, or her happiness is ruined. It is all money; their ideal is the spending of money, their standard is what things cost. I know a lad, who tells me gravely that a fellow can’t have anything to do with girls these days; they have no interest in you but for the money you spend on them, and unless you are rich you cannot “go the pace.” About this school you will see the automobiles parked for blocks; and, of course, the youngsters who drive these cars are the social leaders, they run the school affairs, and they get the girls.

The schools are given up to athletic excitements and “assemblies”; “Aud Calls,” the students term them—that is, calls to the auditorium. They come to practice cheering; they follow the cheer leader, who tells them: “That wasn’t loud enough. Now give one for the team.” The young people come out from these affairs trembling with excitement, and they have no mind for their studies the rest of that day. Out in the halls are students waving balloons which they have bought in the bookstore; on athletic occasions, you see, it looks so lovely if everybody in the bleachers is waving toy balloons with the school colors. They will just get settled in class with their toy balloons, when there comes a call for “fire drill.” Or if such diversions are lacking, the pretty young things take out their vanity boxes and proceed to powder their noses and smear red paint on their lips, while the poor unhappy teachers are trying to put something into their silly heads. I have walked through the corridors of a high school and counted a dozen of the young things performing these toilet operations while chatting with their beaux.

How can the teachers combat such forces? There is only one way, and that is by making the studies interesting, by taking up live topics, which awaken the initiative of the students, and reveal to them the delights of thinking. Several teachers have tried to do this, and the stories of what happened to them are amusing; but unfortunately I cannot tell the stories, because each would identify a teacher, and no teacher dares take that risk! I can tell about a girl who wanted to write a thesis on “The Social Motive in American Literature.” Here was a real subject—but the principal of the school forbade it.

Also I can tell how, during the war, seven high schools took part in a debate: “Resolved, that the nations of the world should adopt the program of the League to Enforce Peace.” You can look back now and see that it was our going into the war blindfolded, our utter failure to know anything about the issues of the peace, that made the great tragedy of Europe. Do not get this League to Enforce Peace confused with pacifist organizations like the Peoples’ Council; this was a perfectly respectable organization, with ex-President Taft as president! But Mr. Jack Bean, a member of the school board, rushed to the “Times” with the charge that the high schools of Los Angeles were carrying on propaganda for immediate peace! The “Times” took it up, and for three days published scare articles accusing two students, Lee Payne and Mildred Ogden, of being pro-German. Young Payne assures me that their only mention of Germany in the entire debate was to quote President Taft’s statement that if the program of the League to Enforce Peace had been in action in 1914, Germany would not have dared to begin the war. But the solemn asses on the board passed a resolution, solemnly forbidding the debating of peace; and the “Times” solemnly printed their resolution under the caption: “Win the War!”

How far the Black Hand is willing to go in this program of cutting out the brains of the school children you may judge by the fact that in 1921 Assemblyman Greene introduced, and the Better America Federation tried to jam through the state legislature, an act providing for the expulsion from the schools of “any teacher who shall disparage to a pupil in the school where said teacher is employed, any provision of the Constitution of the United States of America, or who shall orally make to such pupil any argument or give to such pupil any written or printed argument in favor of making any change in any provision of said Constitution.” And this, you understand, in face of the fact that the Constitution itself provides for its amendment, and has been quite legally and constitutionally amended no less than nineteen times in our history! Think of a school teacher being forbidden by law to discuss with a pupil the desirability of an amendment prohibiting child labor!

A still more curious incident occurs while I am finishing this book. There is in Los Angeles an organization called the Young Workers’ League, an educational society of the Communists; they held a debate on the subject of Communism versus Capitalism, and not being able to get anybody to defend capitalism, they appointed their own speakers, who naturally didn’t do it very ardently. Three lads, one of them a high school student, the other two just graduated, attended the meeting and found themselves dissatisfied with this defense; they rose up and said they could do better, and the result was the planning of a debate. The Young Workers’ League hired a hall, and the three students spent a good part of their summer vacation preparing for the contest. Two or three days before it came off, the Young Workers’ League distributed announcement cards in the high schools, erroneously referring to the students as “three representatives of a high school debating society.” Immediately thereafter the one high school student was informed by Principal Dunn of the Polytechnic High School that he must not take part in the affair. Mr. Dunn did not take this action on his own initiative, he explained, but under instructions from Mrs. Dorsey, who had investigated the matter.

On the afternoon of the day set for the debate, the secretary of the Young Workers’ League appealed to me. Being interested in the cause of free speech, I went to see Mr. Robert Odell, attorney and president of the school board. After hearing my account of the matter, Mr. Odell said that the only objection he could think of was that the debate might not be fair, the audience might be packed against the students. My answer was that I would agree to act as chairman, and see that there was no interruption of the speakers. Mr. Odell agreed to ask Mrs. Dorsey to see me immediately.

It was then four o’clock in the afternoon, and I called on the superintendent, and listened while she explained to me at great length that the schools could not under any circumstances permit students to represent them in public debates unless the students had been selected by the schools. In reply I assured Mrs. Dorsey that I agreed with her absolutely; but if that was all the school authorities wanted, why not require the high school student to state to the audience that he spoke as an individual, and without authorization from his school? I offered as chairman of the debate to make this announcement with the utmost explicitness.

I pointed out to Mrs. Dorsey the singular position in which her schools would be placed by the preventing of this discussion. A large audience would be sent from the hall convinced that the authorities were afraid to let their students face the arguments of the Communists. The students would have to meet Communists in political life, so why not let them practice while in school? Mrs. Dorsey gave me her answer, and I understood it to be that if I would make the announcement as promised, the school authorities would not concern themselves with the debate in any way. I then got the three students together and gave them this information. They reported themselves as anxious to debate, and greatly disappointed at the outcome; but they were not willing even to come upon the platform without first having talked again with their school and college superiors. They would not go into details; but evidently something had been said to them which had taught them caution. Said one of them, significantly: “You know, Mr. Sinclair, the schools can get along without us very easily if they want to.”

Then I tried to arrange for the affair to come off two weeks later, and wrote to the school authorities. What happened between the authorities and the students I do not know; one of the latter, in a letter to me, apologized because he could not “go to the heart of it.” He added: “This much I can tell you—that the determining factor in this case is the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association.” That the lads were wise in keeping out of the debate was shown by the fact that I received from Mrs. Dorsey a special delivery letter, repudiating the understanding of the matter which I had got from her. Said Mrs. Dorsey: “You pressed for assurance that the boys would not be punished by school authorities if they took part in the debate. This assurance I declined to give, stating again that the schools were not a party to the debate and must not, therefore, be involved in any program of arrangements therewith.” So there you have the lady!

At the hour that I was chasing about Los Angeles, interviewing school authorities and trying to save this debate, two enormous bruisers were pummeling each other into insensibility at the Polo Grounds in New York City. One was the champion bruiser of North America, and the other was the champion bruiser of South America, and the two Americas held their breath, awaiting the outcome. That was entirely respectable; that did not threaten the capitalist system, so no one stopped the pummeling, and no one stopped the school children of Los Angeles from reading the newspaper bulletins about the great event. But here were three serious students who were not interested in bruisers; three self-supporting boys had put in all their spare time during vacation, preparing to defend the faith of the schools; and the school superintendent of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association steps in and frightens these boys into silence, and disappoints an audience of a thousand working people who have assembled for an intellectual treat. Such is “culture” under the Black Hand!

CHAPTER XIII
THE TAMMANY TIGER

You shake your head and say: “I had no idea of such things; yes, Southern California must be very bad indeed!” But I beg you not to fool yourself in that way. Southern California is exactly the same as the rest of industrial America. In the course of this book we shall visit the Bay Cities of California, San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley; also Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, in the far Northwest. We shall visit a number of cities scattered across the continent—Spokane, Butte, Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit; on the Atlantic coast we shall visit New York, Boston, Worcester, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington. We shall have glimpses of many towns, and of the rural schools in many states; also we shall not overlook the private schools and the big “prep” schools, where our youthful aristocracy is made ready for the gladiatorial combats and the social intrigues of college.

In all these regions we shall find the plutocracy in control of business and politics; and we shall find the very same interests, and as a rule the very same individuals, in control of the schools. Whether or not they use the methods of the Black Hand depends purely and simply upon one question—to what extent the subject classes are attempting to protest. If the subject classes make no protest, there is no violence by the master class. If the subject classes attempt to protest, then there is whatever amount of violence is necessary to hold them down.

I begin with New York City, because that is the headquarters of our financial, and therefore of our intellectual life. It is from New York that we are controlled, both in body and in mind, whether we have any idea of it or not. As it happens, I know New York and its schools at first hand, having spent my boyhood and youth in the city.

The Black Hand of the metropolis is known as Tammany Hall; and under its shadow I went to school, and also to college—a free, public college, full of Tammany professors. In my home the father of the family was drinking himself to death; it was Tammany saloon-keepers who sold him the liquor, it was Tammany politicians and a Tammany police force which guarded these saloons while they defied a dozen different laws. In that city hundreds of thousands of children were wondering, just as I wondered, why all powers of the state were used for their destruction, instead of for their aid. With the dope-rings and the bootleggers flourishing as they are today, there must be ten times as many children asking this question; and with exceptions so few as to be hardly worth mentioning, all the power of the schools and the colleges, as well as of the pulpit and the press, is devoted to keeping these children from finding out. They kept me from finding out until I had entirely come out from under both the physical and the intellectual control of the Black Hand of New York.

Tammany Hall is an old-style pirate crew, wearing modern clothing and operating systematically at looting the richest of all modern cities. Its symbol is the Tiger. In the days of my boyhood people still remembered Tammany as it was run by Tweed, who carried off a great part of its cash and sold a great part of its belongings. In my day the chief was a grown-up gangster and bruiser by the name of Richard Croker, who stated to a committee of the state legislature, “I am working for my pocket all the time.” His method was to make systematic collections from the brothels and gambling-dives and saloons; also, of course, from the contractors who wanted to charge half a dozen prices for the paving of streets and the removing of the garbage, and other jobs for which a city has to pay.

Even in my day the Tammany chieftains, like other successful bandits, were beginning to grope their way toward respectability. Every bandit in America wishes to become respectable—the test of respectability being that you get a hundred times as much loot. The financiers of Wall Street—the banks and insurance companies and the New York Central Railroad, which were organized as the Republican party and controlled “upstate”—used to fight the Tammany machine year after year, and be beaten, for the simple reason that Tammany controlled the polling places in the East Side slums, and distributed free coal to the poor in winter and free ice in summer, and therefore could count upon loyal “repeaters” and ballot-box staffers at election time. During my youth, the financiers, finding that they could not oust the Tiger, came to terms with it; such men as Whitney and Ryan, the backers of Tammany, were making so many tens of millions out of traction steals that they left the police graft as small change to their political subordinates.

I had an opportunity to observe this transformation at first-hand, for the reason that part of the profits were at my disposal. A friend of my boyhood was founder and president of a big financial concern, which wanted to come into New York. He went to the chiefs of Tammany, and took one of them for his New York manager, and distributed generous blocks of stock to Croker and his henchmen. At once his concern became the official house for that class of business, and the word went out that every politician and every city employe must patronize it. I remember as a lad sitting at luncheon with this friend, hearing him denounce the evil-minded men who criticized our business leaders, the master minds of our country; then presently the conversation changed, and this friend told me how he had just obtained the nomination of one of his managers as state treasurer, and how much he was paying to the campaign fund of the Democratic party, expecting to get it back many times over in the form of business with the state.

Today the chiefs of Tammany Hall are great financiers, and the efforts of the Republican party to win elections in New York City are largely formal. How completely the two parties are one, you realize the instant there is prospect of a Socialist candidate being elected. Immediately the leaders of the two old parties get together and agree upon a ticket, and their watchers at the polls unite to slug the “Reds” and stuff the ballot boxes. Afterwards, when the Socialists collect evidence of these crimes, the Democratic officials of the city and the Republican officials of the state unite in doing nothing about it. And so the Black Hand rules New York.

CHAPTER XIV
GOD AND MAMMON

The education of a million children, and the control of twenty-five thousand teachers in the metropolis, is entrusted to a school board of seven people. The president of this board is a leading real estate operator; the retired president, still a member of the board, is a manufacturer of chemicals, who profiteered extensively during the World War; the next member is a manufacturer of cigars; the next is a leading real estate operator; the next is the private physician to the mayor of the city; the next is a woman of wealth and leisure, who represents the Tammany machine; the last is a lawyer. As always, you will note that there is not one educator on the board. There are few who know anything about education; but all know about business—especially those kinds of business which are transacted with school boards.

What are those kinds of business? To be able to pick the location of handsome new schools is worth a fortune to real estate interests; and that this is regularly done in New York is not my charge, but that of the comptroller of the city. To be able to determine the placing of contracts for school buildings and supplies is worth a fortune to any member of a political machine; and I talked with a former clerk of the school board, who told me he had seen so much graft that he had run away from the sight. I do not mean that this Tammany school board personally carries off the money, as it did in the days of Tweed; the method now is “honest graft”—that is, the placing of school contracts with companies in which your wife’s relatives and the members of your gang are interested. The amount to be expended in New York amounts to a hundred million dollars a year, and Tammany gets it all. At least four of the members of the board are “dummies,” having no function save to vote as the machine directs. All of them are Democrats, and the majority are Catholics; that is to say, the educating of a million American children is in the hands of people who teach that public education is a crime against God.

So it comes about that the principal indictment of this Tammany regime is not the money it spends, but the money it withholds. New York is the wealthiest city in the world; the masters of the city have money for palatial town houses, for country estates many square miles in extent, with homes as big as summer hotels; they have money for private yachts as big as ocean liners, and for luxurious motor cars by the tens of thousands; but they have no money to provide a decent education for the children of the poor. While their own children go to elegant private schools, the children of the poor are herded into dark, insanitary fire-traps, some of them seventy-five years of age; and even of these there is an insufficiency! Ever since my boyhood the refusal of New York City to accommodate the children who clamor for an education has been the blackest crime of the Tammany ruffians. At present one-third of the children are on “part time”; that is, they are turned out of school after two or three hours, to make room for another relay. The rest of the day they pick up the vices of the streets; and if they are made into young criminals, the city is ready and able to build whatever jails may be necessary.

Two years ago a committee of women representing a score of civic organizations—the Women’s Municipal League, the Women’s Department of the National Civic Federation, the Civitas Club of Brooklyn, the Women’s City Club, the League of Catholic Women, etc.—made a careful study of forty of the school buildings of New York City; they reported that twenty out of these forty were fire-traps, old wooden buildings with narrow stairways and no fire escapes. Sanitation was reported “bad” and “wretched” in twenty-one of these schools, and “fair” in eleven more. Twenty-one out of thirty-six were in need of repairs, twenty-seven had only dark basement playgrounds, and so on. I quote a few phrases, just to give you the flavor of these reports:

Boys’ toilets terrible; no basins and towels.... Toilets old and in bad condition; foul air unavoidable.... Plumbing too old to operate, inadequate and unsanitary; few basins and no towels.... Garbage dump nearby, inexcusable menace to health and comfort of the children.... Twelve toilets for twelve hundred boys, old, bad conditions, bad odor. No repairs in years, furniture and woodwork almost falling to pieces.... Fearfully dilapidated; paint and repairs needed on walls; stairs worn down to danger point.... Buildings so old as to be beyond repair, should be abandoned.... Insufficient lighting and ventilation; two rooms with only one window, eight rooms with only two windows.... Fire escapes incomplete and badly constructed.... Wooden buildings, no fire escapes reported.

These reports were given wide publicity; the ladies waited six months, over the summer vacation, and then came back to see what had been done. Out of twenty-three buildings reported dangerous as to fire conditions, twenty remained unchanged. Only two out of twenty-two schools had made any improvement as to provisions for the comfort of the teachers. As regards sanitation, fourteen had been improved, twenty-three had not been changed; and so on. How much the public authorities were concerned about such matters was shown by the experience of the Teachers’ Union, which prepared for an exhibit of the Public Health Association a series of posters and charts showing the physical condition of the schools. “Over nine hundred thousand children suffer from lack of a good ventilation system,” declared one of these posters. “No soap, no water, no towels,” declared another; and so on. Privately the nurses of the Health Department at this show all admitted that the posters represented the truth; but for three days the man who was then commissioner of health and the man who is now commissioner of health sought desperately to compel the Teachers’ Union to remove these posters; failing in this, the publicity agencies of the show cut out all the press notices of the teachers’ exhibits.

What this means to the teachers was set forth to me by the victims. One was teaching a class of children on a dark stone staircase. Another was teaching in a room on a level with the elevated railroad, with trains coming and going on four tracks; she would have to stand in the middle of the room and shout in order to be heard by all the pupils; and this in a new school, just built! An inspector of some sort came along and entered on his report, “room noisy”; the teacher was denied promotion, for some reason which could not be explained, and it was over a year before she could get the matter straightened out—the words “room noisy” had been taken to mean that she did not maintain discipline!

Another woman was teaching physical culture in a dark basement, with water always on the floor. She had seven classes every day, with fifty children in each class; and the gas lights were so feeble that she could not see the children she was supposed to be teaching. She said to one boy: “Stand with your feet together.” He answered: “There’s a puddle of water under me.” And when the physical culture classes got through with this hole, it became a play-ground for the other children!

I am reluctant to introduce into this book any statements which may add to the income of the Grand Imperial Kleagles of the Ku Klux Klan; nevertheless, it is impossible to discuss school conditions in such cities as New York, Boston, St. Louis and San Francisco without mentioning the fact that we have in our country some ten or fifteen million people, held by fear of eternal torment in subjection to a priestly system, which repudiates democracy, repudiates freedom of opinion and of teaching, repudiates everything we know as Americanism. The Catholic church denies the power of the state over marriage and divorce, and above all things else, it denies the right of the state to educate the child. I am going to prove that in detail before I finish; for the present I merely point out that in city after city we shall encounter this influence.

The Catholics, you see, have their system of parochial schools, in which the children are taught the priestly view of life. The church is enormously wealthy, and some of these schools are, as buildings, very fine. Manifestly, the priestly admonition to the faithful, to send their children to church schools, will be much more effective if the public schools are old and filthy and insanitary; and more especially if they are fire-traps! Tammany Hall is a semi-religious institution, maintained by the votes of Irish and Italian and Polish Catholics. Practically the entire list of public officials are Catholics—and this includes the majority of the public school board and of the superintending force. So, to the natural greed of the plutocracy is added the power of priestly intrigue. Mr. Stewart Browne, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, attends every hearing of the Board of Estimate, and of other public bodies having anything to do with appropriations for the schools. His one function is to prevent appropriations; and with the secret help of the Catholic prelates, he succeeds. Thus we observe, in full operation in our modern age, the ancient alliance between the secular arm and the spiritual; we see God and Mammon united to rivet the chains of wage-slavery upon the poor.

CHAPTER XV
HONEST GRAFT

On the top of my desk as I work is a five-foot shelf of big envelopes, containing data on the school systems of various cities. I take one envelope, and sort out its contents, marking the material with the letters, G, F, P, and R. That is to say, Graft, Favoritism, Propaganda and Repression—the four products of education by Big Business. Under the letter F in New York City I find the grievances of scores of teachers with whom I talked. Their story was all the same: the system is brutal, the system is rigid, the system is honeycombed with politics and dishonesty.

It fell to my lot while in the city last year to take part in a public debate with some of the school officials at the Civic Club. To my statement that Tammany was running the schools, Examiner Smith rejoined that all promotions in the system depended upon civil service examinations—he knew, because he did the examining. But when he was pinned down, he admitted that the twenty-six district superintendents, the eight associate superintendents, and the thirty high school principals were all excluded from the civil service list; and here, of course, are the prizes for which everyone is striving. At that very moment the schools were in an uproar because of the appointment to a superintendent’s position of Mrs. Grace Forsythe, a Catholic lady who had not even high school qualifications; also of Margaret McCooey, sister of one of the Tammany bosses. Milo MacDonald, a Catholic, had been appointed principal of a high school from the rank of ordinary teacher; Henrietta Rodman told me of another teacher, a Catholic, who took the examination for elementary principalship and failed, and was appointed to a high school principalship. Other cases have happened since.

These are a few out of scores of cases that were detailed to me. I was told of a Catholic who took an examination, and then was permitted to withdraw his papers and write up a new set at home. It is a matter of record that Mr. Somers, member of the board of education—a super-patriot, who called the Teachers’ Union treasonable—let off a clerk of the school board who had been proven guilty of misappropriating funds; also another who was charged with letting people get copies of examination papers in advance, and of selling information to candidates. Both these people, Catholics, got off with a fine of a few days’ pay, and both are still in the system.

A form of “honest graft” which has been widely developed under this Tammany regime is the writing of text-books by school officials. Many of the text-books in use in the public schools of New York bear the names of people in the system; in many cases they were written by teachers, but officials have put their names upon them, and get the greater part of the profits. The principals recommend these books for use, and the board of superintendents adopts them. Former Superintendent Maxwell had a large income from books published by the American Book Company which he himself had not written; and a number of the district superintendents get their share. The New York “Globe,” discussing the case of Maxwell, showed how in his position he had the power to increase the sales of his own books; and this same power is possessed by all the gang. I was told of one head of a department with a book to sell, who got himself transferred three times to different parts of the city—starting in the High School of Commerce in Manhattan, from there to the Commercial High School of Brooklyn, and then to Long Island—and in each place he took with him his commercial arithmetic. The teachers did not want it, but in every school the other texts were thrown out and the new one introduced. All over New York—and all over America, as we shall find—there are school basements and cupboards filled with discarded text-books, or new text-books which are so bad that the teachers will not use them.

Needless to say, many of the Tammany superintendents and principals are ignorant men, utterly unfitted for scholastic duties. I look back on my own days in the College of the City of New York, and recall the comical old boys whom the Tammany machine appointed to teach me literature and philosophy and Latin, and other high-brow subjects. Therefore, I was not surprised to be told of a superintendent who talks about “algebray,” and who says: “As I was a-saying,” etc. The French teachers find amusement in the efforts of superintendents to pretend that they know French. I talked with a charming lady of Spanish birth, who attempted to get by one of these examiners, but he reported her French as “very bad”; she “ran all her words together.” Anyone who has listened to a Frenchman talk will appreciate the humor of this comment; one might say that the first qualification for speaking good French is to run your words together to the utmost possible extent. This lady went to see Professor Cohn, head of the department of French of Columbia University, and one of our leading French scholars. He reported that she spoke French “like a native,” and took occasion to add that he knew the examiner in question, and knew him to be ignorant of French.

This lady got her appointment; but presently she discovered that the head of her French department didn’t know any French; necessarily, her pupils discovered it also; and that made her unpopular with her superior. She was refused promotion upon the ground that she was “a non-conformist.” She told me of her adventures in trying to get something explicit from the examiners; she called several times upon Examiner Smith, the same gentleman who debated with me at the Civic Club. Mr. Smith was in a hurry to catch a train, and asked the lady to tell him her story while he was washing his hands in a lavatory. She was so fastidious as to think that was not quite a courteous examination!

I talked with a young man, who had been for many years in the system, and with whom they had not been able to find fault; his ratings had been “double A” from the beginning of his career. But what chance had the system to hold an energetic man, who saw all promotion depending upon favoritism and graft, and saw himself condemned to a subordinate position, taking orders from pompous ignoramuses? The desirable positions in the system are few—the Board of Estimate sees to that!—and the struggle for them is tense, and the way of promotion is the way of intrigue. Here were people giving courses to teachers, instructing them how to pass examinations for promotion—and then these same people conducting the examinations! Here were examiners with agents out touting for them! (You see, they teach what is called “salesmanship” in the New York schools; and evidently, they practice what they teach!) My young friend went out into the business world, and is making a good living. He explained the difference this made in his life; when he met business men, he was an equal among equals, but as a teacher he had had to tremble before a board of examiners who could not have passed one of their own examinations.

“I do not know of a school system in the United States which is run for the benefit of the pupils; they are all run for the benefit of the gang”; thus District Superintendent Tildsley, debating with me before the Civic Club. Dr. Tildsley added that by “the gang” he meant the superintendents, the principals and the teachers. It was kind of him to add the teachers, but some of them in the audience did not appreciate his compliment. There is quite a group in the New York schools who are really concerned for the children, and feel no sense of solidarity with the bigoted autocracy which at present holds the power.

“It is the duty of a teacher who knows of anything wrong in the school system to complain to her superiors about it,” said the pious Dr. Tildsley; and there came a chorus from all over the room: “Yes, and lose her job!” Dr. Tildsley was pained by the suggestion that a teacher might encounter trouble as result of just complaints, made at the proper time and in the proper manner. As it happened, however, I had spent that morning in the home of Mr. James F. Berry, a teacher of mathematics at DeWitt Clinton High School, who had been for twenty-three years in the system, and took seriously the idea that a teacher has responsibility for teaching conditions. Mr. Berry made complaint against the grossest kind of evils in the school—cruelty to pupils, dishonesty, and acts of injustice by those in authority. As a result, his career in the system was one long misery. He was denied promotion to which he was justly entitled; and he put in my hands a little diary, in which he had kept the record of two decades of struggle for his rights. I glance through it and find entries such as this:

Mr. Tildsley exemplified today his arbitrary and disagreeable way of dealing with those under him, by making a perfectly groundless accusation against me. It was easy to disprove, and then he virtually apologized, though with no sign of regretting his accusation. I have observed this practice of sweeping statements by him, and if they are not promptly disproved one feels that he takes them for granted as true and admitted, and such an impression does not make for good-will.

I shall before long show you how at this same DeWitt Clinton High School there has been established with official sanction an elaborate system of espionage; a teacher drawing full salary devotes the greater part of his time to training pupils to spy upon other teachers, and when these pupils bring reports of unorthodox ideas and utterances, the pupils are praised for a meritorious service. But in the case of Mr. Berry I find that the disposition to report genuine evils is described by Dr. Tildsley as “a tendency to tale-bearing which lessens efficiency!”

Why Dr. Tildsley did not like the “tale-bearing” of Mr. Berry is easy to understand. In 1914 Dr. Tildsley was principal of the DeWitt Clinton High School, and when he was moved on to a higher position, two of his favorite teachers in the school, who were in line for principalships, and who have since been made principals, took five hundred and twenty-five dollars out of the “general organization fund” of the school—that is, money contributed by the students for student activities—and used it to purchase a silver service which was presented to Dr. Tildsley. The source of this money was kept a secret, but Mr. Berry learned about it, and wrote to the president of the board of education, pointing out that this was a clear violation of the law, as well as a great injustice to the pupils, most of whom were poor and many self-supporting. Had not one teacher been turned out of the system for accepting a box of candy from her pupils? A scandal was threatened, but it was hushed up, the newspapers co-operating by not publishing a line. Dr. Tildsley returned the silver service, which was sold, I am informed, to George Sylvester Viereck. For nine years Mr. Berry has been persecuted because of this affair; while Dr. Tildsley was promoted to be deputy boss of the gang!

They have a method of punishing teachers which they learned from the police department in New York. Every now and then some policeman takes it upon himself to enforce a law which his superiors are using as a means of extortion; they will shift this policeman to the Bronx, and a month later they will send him to Brooklyn, and a month later to Staten Island, and so on—the poor wretch spends the greater part of his life on street cars, getting to his job and back. In the case of a teacher they wait just long enough for her to get settled in a new home, and then they move her again. It is something understood by all teachers that anyone who opposes the principal will find herself “transferred,” or lowered in ratings, or will have hard classes, or longer hours with no more pay. Said one to me: “Any teacher who brings charges against a principal is ruined. It matters nothing what the charges are: stealing school funds, or beating the pupils, or offensive advances of a sexual nature. All that happens is the principal denies the charges, and the matter is dropped; a teacher’s testimony counts for no more than the testimony of a Negro in the South.”

New York is not an “open shop” city, and so the teachers have a union. Its leaders suffer discrimination when it comes to promotion, but that does not break the union down. As part of the campaign against it, the authorities maintain a “yellow” union; that is, an organization which is supposed to represent the teachers, but can be controlled by the gang. The name of this is the “Teachers’ Council.” It purports to be a representative body, but the teachers do not vote directly, they vote for delegates from all organizations recognized by the board of education; and the insiders will belong to as many as ten or a dozen organizations, and will have a vote in each. The machine has its henchmen in all the key positions, and the surest way to promotion in the system lies in the rendering of this kind of Judas service. This “Teachers’ Council” is accustomed to attack the reputations of union teachers, and never give them opportunity to reply; the slander, whatever it is, will be quoted in the “Times” as representing the opinion of “twenty-five thousand organized teachers.” We are in New York now, not in Los Angeles, but you note that we still have our “Times,” and it is exactly the same kind of “Times”—it will publish any falsehood about an independent man or woman, and will give the victim no chance to answer.

CHAPTER XVI
A LETTER TO WOODROW WILSON

Needless to say, the first duty of this Tammany school board is to enforce loyalty to the plutocracy; and, needless to say, this constitutes “patriotism” and “religion.” Mr. Aaron Dotey, Chief Spy of the DeWitt Clinton High School, brought in a report last year, charging a school teacher with having said that “patriotism is a murderer’s occupation and a traitor’s cloak.” It did not occur to Mr. Dotey that this might not be the teacher’s fault. The Chief Spy should have mentioned that a hundred and fifty years or so ago a leading Englishman of letters, a prize old Tory, made the statement that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

The hounding of the teachers by the scoundrels began at the very outbreak of the war. First, there was the “mayor’s pledge,” which they all were required to swear; this not being enough, there was another pledge contrived by the board of education. All the teachers were loyal, but not all of them were willing to swear away their right to think. There were eighty-seven conscientious objectors to the “loyalty pledges.” A number of these subsequently served in the army and made distinguished records; but intention to enlist did not save them from persecution at the outbreak of the war, nor did their war-records save them from persecution after they came back.

In the fall of 1917 there occurred an outbreak at the DeWitt Clinton High School. Dr. Tildsley arbitrarily lengthened the school day, when already the teachers and pupils were overworked. A deputation of pupils waited upon the board of education, to protest against the proposed measure, and were received by John Whalen, board member and prominent Tammany chieftain, who settled the matter as follows: “I want it clearly understood that neither the pupils nor the teachers will be allowed to run the schools. And I want you to understand that if you pupils don’t go back and behave yourselves I’ll close down all the schools. Do you understand?” The pupils went back and reported, and there was the beginning of a strike; also there was a meeting of the teachers of DeWitt Clinton, attended by more than a hundred, who adopted the following so-called “Whalen Resolution”:

First:—That it is the sense of this meeting that John Whalen’s assertion is contrary to the modern spirit of true democracy.

Second:—That remarks of this type and threats to close the high schools are detrimental to good discipline and good teaching.

Third:—It is the sense of this meeting that the autocratic assertion of John Whalen is subversive of the proper spirit underlying our educational institutions.

Fourth:—Be it finally resolved:

That the best interests of school administration demand the cordial recognition of the classroom teacher as a most vital influence in the educational system.

This, of course, was a direct challenge to the power of the gang; a revolt which must be put down at all hazards. Superintendent Tildsley came up to ascertain the names of the ring-leaders, and especially of the one who had drafted those incendiary words. The spy department was ready with the information; the criminal was Samuel Schmalhausen, a Jewish Socialist, twenty-nine years of age. It was resolved to drive Schmalhausen out of the system, and with him two other Socialist teachers, Mufson and Schneer. The spy department undertook to get something on these teachers without delay; and we are now going to hear a little story, which shows in detail exactly how a school spy department works.

In a day or two word was brought to Dr. Paul, principal of the school, that Mr. Schmalhausen had assigned to his pupils a theme for a composition, as follows: “Write an open letter to Woodrow Wilson, commenting frankly, within the limits of your knowledge, upon his conduct of the war against the German government.” Almost certainly some East Side Jewish boy would make that an occasion for disrespectful expressions; so Dr. Paul sent the head of his English department, Miss Garrigues, to Mr. Schmalhausen’s room. This lady rushed up in breathless haste and caught the pupils in the act of turning in their themes; she took possession of them, without giving Mr. Schmalhausen a chance to see them, and delivered them to Dr. Paul, who went over them. Among seventy-six themes he discovered one that justified his hopes—a bitter, sneering letter, written by a seventeen-year-old Jewish boy.

Dr. Paul, being skilled in intrigue, saw how this thesis would “go” in the capitalist press; his venom bubbled over and he exclaimed: “Now I’ve got him!” At least, Miss Garrigues on the witness stand testified that he said that. Dr. Paul denied it with asperity, and when asked to explain how Miss Garrigues could have thought she heard it, he described her as “an emotionally energized lady on occasions.” Poor Miss Garrigues—she was new to public life, and did not realize that the first essential to success is to be a fluent and tactful liar.

Dr. Tildsley came, and he also recognized the opportunity. He summoned Schmalhausen, and first pinned him down to the fact that he had written the “Whalen resolution”; then he set for this sensitive minded and idealistic young teacher an extremely cunning trap. You understand, Mr. Schmalhausen had not yet seen the criminal theme; and Dr. Tildsley did not let him see it now. He read him the first page of it—the first page being mild, and all the outrageous statements being found in the latter pages! So Dr. Tildsley trapped Mr. Schmalhausen into saying that he would merely make some minor corrections of expression in the theme; at least, Dr. Tildsley testified that that is what the young teacher said—Mr. Schmalhausen denied it. Later on Dr. Tildsley, consulting the rest of the gang, realized that his case did not look quite right, so he went back to the school, and read the entire composition to Mr. Schmalhausen, asking what would have been his action as a teacher in such a situation. Mr. Schmalhausen undertook to mark the theme as he would have marked it in the due course of his class work. His comments, written along the margin of the theme, were as follows:

Exaggerated, excessive emotionalism.... Is there any sanity in this assertion?... Do you take these remarks seriously?... For a thoughtful student this statement sounds irrational.... Recall President Wilson’s differentiation between the German Government and the German people.... Not accurately presented.... Foolish attitude historically.... Do you believe in its sincerity? (peace offer made by Germany).... Sorry to find this unintelligent comment in your work.... Why did you write this?

Mr. Schmalhausen was suspended from his duties without pay, and in due course was haled before a committee of the board of education. It is interesting to note that the chairman of this committee was none other than John Whalen, Tammany chieftain, who had started all the trouble by threatening to close all the schools! I have before me the testimony at the hearing, as published in pamphlet form by the Teachers’ Union. John Dewey describes it as the most comic document of the age, so it will pay us to read a few passages: first, the testimony of Miss Garrigues, as to why she considered Mr. Schmalhausen’s theme “an unwise assignment.” Do not fail to note from this passage the high standards of English expression which prevail in the English department of New York’s biggest high school:

Q. May I ask why you considered it an unwise assignment? A. I think the reason was that it was a little bit, in the nature of the wording, inclined to lead boys who were either pacific, I think is the real trouble, or were unpatriotic—this boy unquestionably was unpatriotic, I think—to express themselves very freely, which I do not know whether it is very wise for boys of that age to do.

Also you will wish to hear Superintendent Tildsley upon this same grave question. Dr. Tildsley was very sure that Schmalhausen had made a mistake in assigning such a theme. He explained in detail why the boys of the DeWitt Clinton High School were unfit persons to address imaginary letters to Woodrow Wilson. He said:

They are very much interested in the social life and the political life of this city; they are exceedingly fond of discussion and they have developed a rather high degree of critical ability and critical tendency, and the only thing that they like more than anything else I should say, is a discussion on social, political and economical topics; they are more interested in that than they are in being good or even than they are in athletics.

That students should be more interested in “a discussion on social, political and economical topics” than they are in athletics, would be recognized by any superintendent of schools in America as a state of affairs full of menace to our institutions, and under no circumstances to be tolerated. Cross-questioned further, Dr. Tildsley stated that he would not think it right to let boys in the DeWitt Clinton High School write on the negative of this topic: “We seek no selfish ends in this world.” He would not consider it proper to let them write on the negative of the topic: “Conscription is justifiable under a democracy.” He would not think it was proper to permit them to write an essay on the subject: “Revenue by bond issue or taxation.” After Dr. Tildsley had made these emphatic statements, the cross-questioner sprang on him the painful tidings that all three of these themes had been in the examination papers of the DeWitt Clinton High School of the previous week—officially adopted with the approval of his friend and admirer, the “emotionally energized” Miss Garrigues of the English department!

Mr. Schmalhausen was on the stand for a couple of hours; and as you read the testimony you recognize a man of culture and fine sensibility, a teacher profoundly conscientious, with deep respect for the personalities of his students. He told how he would have dealt with that theme if it had come up in his class; he would have questioned the pupil and showed him his ignorance, and tried to make him realize that his ideas were wrong. Asked if he disagreed with the opinions expressed in the theme, Mr. Schmalhausen replied:

Oh, absolutely, from head to foot. The subject matter is offensive from every point of view. Part of it is irrational. Part of it is crude and violent, the whole thing is a wrong frame of mind, and in my discussion with Dr. Tildsley, with which I took up a lot of time, I tried to explain clearly what influences in that boy’s social and economical and home environment were responsible for some of his sentiments. So far as I was concerned there was no implication at all at any time that I ever accepted the thought of that letter.

Nevertheless, Mr. Schmalhausen was driven from the school system of New York, and with him Mr. Mufson and Mr. Schneer. The offense of Mr. Schneer was that he had given to some of his pupils a list of books, with comments on their contents in the somewhat flowery style of a young man who takes great literature with sudden and intense seriousness. There were two hundred books listed, and a committee of the Schoolmasters’ Association undertook to mark ten of them which were especially offensive. One was Eltzbacher’s “Anarchism”—which turned out upon investigation to be a work opposing Anarchism, written by a non-Anarchist; poor Mr. Schneer had been trying to save his East Side Jewish boys from the snares of the extremists! Another was Romain Rolland’s “Jean Christophe,” one of the greatest novels and noblest works of culture of our time. A third was listed as “Sinclair’s ‘The Divine Fire.’” No one could guess why the committee should have objected to this eminently respectable novel; it occurs to me that Mr. Schneer’s failure to give the first names of his authors may have betrayed the schoolmasters into thinking that he had endorsed a book by my wicked self! I occasionally get letters intended for May Sinclair; so let me state that the author of “The Divine Fire” lives in England, and is not related to me, nor in any way to blame for my evil actions and writings—except that she occasionally writes me letters approving them!

CHAPTER XVII
AN ARRANGEMENT OF LITTLE BITS

The expulsion of these three teachers was, of course, a personal triumph for Mr. Aaron Dotey, Chief Spy of the DeWitt Clinton High School. The activities of the “Dotey Squad,” as the spies and informers are termed, were now extended to cover the entire system. The Chief Spy compiled a card index, with detailed information about suspected teachers. I have talked with some who have been privileged to inspect this catalogue, and have seen on Mr. Dotey’s desk a dossier of clippings and reports a foot high, relating to one group of rebel teachers in the system!

Mr. Dotey’s training for this work had been thorough; first, he was a sheriff; then, becoming a teacher, he was put in charge of the “corridor squad,” which has to do with discipline. He struck one pupil in the jaw and knocked him down for talking in line; he was accustomed to summon unruly pupils to his room and administer the “third degree,” calling them foul names, shouting and storming at them in a voice which could be heard all over the building, and which became a scandal throughout the system. One of the crimes of Mr. Schmalhausen was that he had proposed a program of student self-government, thus eliminating Mr. Dotey. To complete the picture of this furious old bigot, I mention that he was “converted” by his Catholic wife, which fact now puts him in line for a big promotion.

The next teacher to fall a victim was Mr. Benjamin Glassberg, of the Commercial High School of Brooklyn, who was notified that he was suspended without pay. Mr. Glassberg’s hard luck was that a boy in his class had asked him “whether or not Lenin and Trotsky were, in his opinion, German agents or German spies.” I quote the exact words of Mr. Glassberg’s answer, as sworn to by thirty-five boys in the class; eight of these boys testified, and then the board got tired of hearing them, and the testimony of the other twenty-seven was entered by stipulation—that is, both sides agreed upon a statement of what the twenty-seven[twenty-seven] would testify in substance. Mr. Glassberg’s reply was that: “he did not think so, as Lenin and Trotsky had been busy circulating propaganda literature against the war among the Germans, thereby undermining their morale, and weakening their power in the war.”

Here was another Socialist teacher whom it was desired to “get,” and this was the chance to “get” him. There were forty-three boys in the class, and more than thirty were Jewish. The principal summoned before him, one at a time, two Jewish boys and ten Gentile boys, and questioned them as to what had happened in the class, trying to get them to say the worst possible things against Mr. Glassberg. A stenographer was present and took down what the boys said; then, according to the testimony of one of the boys, a most eager opponent of Mr. Glassberg, the principal “made an arrangement of little bits” of what the boys had said, and made it into a statement. The boys were summoned several times—for a period of eight weeks this coaching and rehashing of the charges went on, and meantime Mr. Glassberg was suspended without pay, and could not get the copy of the charges to which he was legally entitled! It finally became necessary for his lawyers to apply to the Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus, compelling the service of the charges upon Mr. Glassberg!

The statement, when finally prepared, was an obvious perversion of everything which even the most hostile of the boys alleged. This was, let remind you, a time when the principal news out of Soviet Russia was “the nationalization of women”; and here was a teacher, questioned by his students, and telling them the plain and obvious truth. Let me quote a little more of the testimony—and please note that I am quoting from the stipulated testimony of thirty-five members of the class:

Another boy in the class made a statement, though apparently rising to ask a question, to the effect that it must be that Lenin and Trotsky’s government was stronger with the people than the Kerensky government for the reason that it held on longer than the Kerensky government, and it could hardly be that the Bolsheviki were such thieves and cut-throats as represented if their government lasted so long. This boy’s statement Mr. Glassberg did not discuss at any length, because it was made at the end of the period, but did indicate in what he said that since the Lenin-Trotsky government had lasted longer than the Kerensky regime, this indicated that it must have considerable strength with the people. Another boy asked if information about the Bolsheviki was being withheld and Mr. Glassberg said that he was inclined to think so, and read certain questions which Senator Johnson had read in the Senate some time previous asking information about Russian conditions, and also referred to the fact that Colonel Robins of the Red Cross had been requested upon his return to this country by the State department, not to discuss the Russian situation, and also referred to a speech made by Major Thatcher of the Red Cross at a banquet in Boston at which he had defended the Bolsheviki from the attacks made upon them by some previous speakers.

Colonel Raymond Robins took the witness stand, and testified that upon his return from Russia he had been requested by the State Department not to discuss the Russian situation. Major Thatcher also took the stand, and testified to the truth of what Mr. Glassberg had said about him. It is interesting to note that the principal of the school informed some of the boys who were to testify at the hearing that Major Thatcher, an army officer of the highest standing, was “a criminal.” Also, a number of the boys told how the principal had attempted to intimidate them before they went upon the witness stand. To quote one case: “Do you know, boys, that Mr. Glassberg was charged with conduct unbecoming a teacher; therefore it means that you boys who are going to testify for Mr. Glassberg are UN-AMERICAN.” The boy’s reply was: “Mr. Raynor, do you know that when we are going to testify for Mr. Glassberg, we are going to tell what we heard in our class, and no more. We are going to tell the truth.”

Mr. Glassberg’s record as a teacher was produced before the board. His ratings during his entire five years had been the highest possible, this applying both to discipline and to teaching. Nevertheless, he was driven from the schools; and soon afterwards went Benjamin Harrow, whose crime was that he advised his students to read a magazine article by Thorstein Veblen. Also, according to the official statement of Superintendent Tildsley, “his favorite reading is said to be the ‘Nation,’ the ‘New Republic’ and the ‘Dial.’ He occupied a front seat at each session of the Glassberg trial, and seemed to approve sentiments expressed in favor of the Bolshevists.” In this same official document is given an idea of the cultural level of the district superintendent in charge of all the high schools of New York City; says Dr. Tildsley: “Mr. Harrow recommended his pupils to read an article in the ‘Dial’ of February 22, 1919, by Thornstein Veller!” Mr. Harrow did not wait to be tried before John Whalen and the rest of the thugs. He handed in his resignation, with a blistering letter to Dr. Tildsley, asserting:

You are using the school as a medium for conducting a campaign of propaganda in favor of the most reactionary tendencies of our day.... In short, you have made the schools an unhappy place for any sensitive American who refuses to accept your own individual conception of what constitutes Americanism, who prefers rather to accept what the founders of this republic conceived to be the true American ideals.

Also, while dealing with teacher casualties, I must pay honor to Dr. Arthur M. Wolfson, who was principal of the High School of Commerce, and resigned as protest against this White Terror. Dr. Wolfson knew that he was dealing with boys who came from Socialist homes, and he had conceived it his duty as an educator to take a stand of neutrality in the issues of the class struggle. He would teach his students the ideal of freedom of discussion, and a hearing for both sides. For many years he followed that program, and as a result there was in his school an atmosphere of tolerance and fellowship unknown in other New York high schools.

But it had been the custom when election time came round for the history and civics department to take a straw ballot for the presidency; and this time the dreadful discovery was made that three hundred and fifty-four out of the two thousand students had voted for Debs! It was proposed to tell this news in the school weekly, but the superintendent in charge ordered this paper suppressed, and rebuked Dr. Wolfson for taking the straw vote. Dr. Wolfson pointed out that the “Literary Digest” was doing the same thing. Also, if the students were for Debs, would it do any good to suppress the fact? Would it not be best to face the fact and deal with it? A little later Dr. Wolfson got his orders about Russia; no longer was there to be free discussion; he was to teach one view and only one view—that is, the official propaganda of the young secretaries of our State Department who, with their aristocratic Russian wives, were conducting a private war against the Russian people without authorization from Congress.

Later, Dr. Wolfson was ordered to enforce a rule forbidding the New York “Call” to be carried in class-rooms or study-halls. So he wrote a dignified letter to the board of superintendents, explaining: “Frankly, during the last two or three years I have not felt free to follow the intellectual habits of a lifetime.” Superintendent Ettinger came back with a letter to the New York “Times,” declaring:

I am very frank to confess that I dissent most heartily from the basic thesis set up by Principal Wolfson that it is the function of our schools to allow students and teachers to express their belief freely, to meet argument with argument, and not either overtly or covertly to suppress opinions which are held in honesty and in good faith.